You have nothing to lose but your chains.

[KaiserMuffin]

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

[KaiserMuffin]

A KaiserMuffin AAR

Prologue, A movement arises:

1. You Have Nothing to Lose but your Chains
2. A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of Communism
3. Misery motivates, not Utopia
4. Revolutions are the locomotives of History
5. I don't like money, money is the reason why we fight
6. Necessity is blind until it is conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity
7. Workingmen of the World, unite!
8. The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to Socialism
9. The state is not abolished. It withers away
10. I may have many faults but being wrong ain't one of them.
11. Direct Threats Require Decisive Action.
12. The things that you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.
13. You will not be saved. We are all going to die one day.
14. When there is state there can be no freedom, but when there is freedom there will be no state

Chapter 1, The Birth of a Nation:

1. Greater things are believed of those who are absent
2. The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain
3. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of it's own future
4. We're all going to die, Die standing up!
5. Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history
6. How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?
7. Time to stand up for what you believe in
8. An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come

Chapter 2, The Project for a New South American Century:

1. Don't Fight the Problem, Decide it.
2. I walk the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker
3. Nobody can live in a society without conventions
4. Trial Footnote: The Deportation of Fritz Julius Kuhn
5. What you need is Direct Action

I will update this for the final time when the AAR is complete.

{{{COOKIE JAR}}}
Showcased on 22.III.2010.
Awarded Cookie of Extreme Awesome ●
the Cookie of Extreme Uber Albanian Awesomeness! ◖◗
awarded 24.III.2010 by Lighthearter and QuAnTuM respectively.

Winner of the 2010 Round 1 ACA award for HOI2 History Book AAR. Results given on 07-VI-2010

[c0d5579]

Do you EVER sleep?

(Reminds me, I need to get caught up on Carthage.)

[KaiserMuffin]

The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.

In 1925, four years after the traitorous Peace with Honour, the beginning of a revolution occured: a labour dispute in the coalfields of South Wales quickly escalated after the government ordered the army to restore order. Unwilling to stand for such flagrant aggression against fellow workers, a General Strike was called by the TUC to bring the government to it's knees. When the government sent orders for the military to quell the unrest, the armed forces joined the side of the workers, understanding that they had more in common with the men they had been sent to fight than those who commanded them. The revolution was established within six weeks - although one flaw was that several notable men of the navy mislead their crews allowing the evacuation of the British Monarchy and the so called 'social elites'

Following the fall of the corrupt government, the revolutionarys dissolved both Houses of Parliament, and declared that the de jure political authority in the Union of Britain would pass to a new Trade Unions Congress.

Following the revolution, 1926 saw the formative Congresses of Socialist Britain, with advocates of various positions coming together to hammer out the framework of the new state. What resulted was a compromise between the factions that enshrined the principals of decentralization of power out of greedy hands, co-operativism so that each may have according to his needs, and isolation from the continental struggles that ruined the nation in 1921.

This resulted in the establishment of locally elected councils as the main organ of government under the guiding aegis of the TUC, a dominant public sector, and a diplomatic stance that has emphasized self-defense and national self-reliance above all else for the last decade. Britain shall stand alone, but she shall stand strong.

-Eric Blair, Modern Britain, Summary

[Lighthearter]

<Raises eyebrow>

Following this!

[Sectorknight21]

Looks spectacular and I can't wait for more!

Also I have to second it, do you ever sleep ?

[KaiserMuffin]

“But there is more to it than that,” I said. “There is such a thing as a revolutionary form of organization. The One Big Union is not a revolutionary outcry, it is a method of work.”

Foster’s reply was that

“It isn’t any special kind of organization – it is the fact of solidarity that we want.”

William Z. Foster was a prominent figure within IWW soon enough, he served as their representative at the international labor conference in Budapest in 1911 and a contributed to its papers. His personal politics, however, were moving him away from the IWW. He was considered to have become a committed syndicalist by his peers after the tour of Europe he had been on between 1910 and 1911, and upon his return he criticized the IWW for not working within established unions and subverting the system from the inside.

He denounced electoral politics as a dead end that smothered the revolutionary ardor of these groups by channeling their energies into pursuit of office, with all the compromises that entails.

He became and has been ever since an advocate of direct action at the shop floor level leading to workers' governance of society, but without the dead weight of bureaucratic structures. Over the years this has lead some to call him an anarchist.

-John 'Jack' Reed, Doctrine and Discussion: Biographies of our Thinkers

[serutan]

The only question remaining is, which of the Syndie scum he's going to play.

[KaiserMuffin]

1. Yes. I do, but I have the advantage of not having to get up till 9:30 5 days a week, so I can allow myself the extravagence of staying up late to pander to my american readers.

2. This will be a CSA AAR starting in 1937. It'll be history book/story oriented, but I'll try to sprinkle some action in.

3. RE:Carthage. My source material got silly... so my story got silly. I might come back to it, but I think I pretty damn well ruined it if I'm honest.

4. I have another update lined up. Who will post a comment in order to get it before I go to bed...

Serutan gets Jack Reed's Ninja Cookie... it's so fast, it's invisible.

[KaiserMuffin]

Our epoch is rich in sensational events, richer than any other epoch in history.

At bottom, this fact expresses the conflict between two powerful forces: an unprecedented need and possibility of social peace and order, on the one hand; and on the other, an equally unprecedented social chaos and social uncertainty. Every time these forces collide violently, the world is taken by surprise.

Max Shachtman was born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. He emigrated with his family to New York City in 1905.

At an early age, he became interested in Marxism and was sympathetic to the radical wing of the Socialist Party. Having dropped out of City College, in 1921 he joined the Workers' Council, a Bolshevist organization led by J.B. Salutsky and Alexander Trachtenberg which was critical of the U.S. Bolshevist Faction but merged into it in August 1921 before it's dissolution in December 1921, two months after the fall of Soviet Russia. Shachtman was persuaded by Martin Abern to move to Chicago to become an organizer for the IWWorld Youth Organization and edit the Young Worker. After joining the IWW, he rose to become an alternate member of its Central Committee. He edited Labor Defender, a journal of International Labor Defense, which he made the first photographic magazine on the US left, as using the magazine to champion the cases of class war martyrs such as Sacco and Vanzetti.

-John 'Jack' Reed, Doctrine and Discussion: Biographies of our Thinkers

[The War Monger]

:O This makes me half want to set up a AAR myself as the AUS.....maybe over easter....for now......I will be lurking!

[Asalto]

Very interesting. Will there be a conflict of political factions inside CSA? There is some rivality between diffrent groups in KR proletarian countries:

CoF: Sorelians, Travailleurs, Jacobins, Anarchists.

UoB: Federationists, Congregationalists, Authonomists, Maximists.

RoS: Anarcho-Syndicalists, Social-Reformists, National-Syndicalists.

Bengal: Radical Socialists, Social Democrats.

Georgia: Mencheviks, Bolsheviks.

While CSA are mix of Bolsheviks, Syndicalists, Radical Socialists, Social Democrats and even some Anarchists, internal split is not excluded. But they will probably have more troubles with external enemies like USA and AUS. Will follow.

[Evans]

Federationists, Congregationalists, Authonomists, Maximists.

That they went with this grouping is just.... blluuueerrgghhh. It has so little to do with any actual groups in British socialist history. So please KaiserMuffin, if you can, rewrite the history of the Union of Britain! I want my Fabian Radicals fighting against Tom Mann and Guy Bowman et al, fighting against people like Dutt and the Marxist minority, with G.D.H. Cole and the Guild Socialists caught in the middle

[The War Monger]

I believe that the Maximists were in fact socialists, well Oswald was anyway >.> Personally I am rooting for Oswald to win the events for UoB, nothing cooler than George Orwell as Sub-Chairman....

[KaiserMuffin]

Personally, I take neither pleasure nor interest in going into any war whatever; still, to declare oneself against war seems to me silly and useless. One has to set material forces against it, not mere attitudes, and anyone who fails to take part in shaping those forces is also not against war, however much he may protest that he is. The question itself suggests the idea that one is supposed to come out for peace and against war, but I am opposed to capitalist peace just as much as to capitalist war. Nor do I have any choice between the two situations; I can only contribute to putting an end to a system which has to assure its existence on the tendency to alternate between war and peace.

Born in Pomerania in 1904 and raised in Berlin by class conscious parents, Paul Mattick was already at the age of 14 a member of the Spartacists' Freie Sozialistische Jugend(Free Socialist Youth). In 1918, he started to learn as a toolmaker at Siemens AG, where he was also elected as the apprentices' delegate on the workers' council of the company.

Implicated in many actions during the attempted 1918 revolution, arrested several times and threatened with death, Mattick radicalized along the left and oppositional trend of the German Bolshevists. After the "Heidelberg" split of the Bolshevist Party of Germany (BPD; a successor to the Spartacist League) and the formation for the Socialist Workers Party of Germany (SAPD) in the spring of 1920, he entered the SAPD and worked in the youth organization Rote Jugend (Red Youth), writing for its journal.

In 1921, at the age of 17, Mattick moved to Cologne to find work with Klockner for a while, until strikes, insurrections and a new arrest destroyed every prospect of employment. He was active as an organizer and agitator in the KAPD in the Cologne region, where he got to know many prominent German socialists.

With the continuing decline of radical mass struggle and revolutionary hopes, especially after 1921, and having been unemployed for a number of years, Mattick emigrated to the United States in 1926.

-John 'Jack' Reed, Doctrine and Discussion: Biographies of our Thinkers

[KaiserMuffin]

You can be listening to the radio and hear Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Greta Garbo drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All Cokes are the same and all Cokes are good. Greta Garbo knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

NATIONALISM IS A CREATED PRODUCT.

During the Russian Revolution of 1905, David attended a mass meeting which led to his kinship, if not actual membership, with the Bund, a Jewish socialist organization close to the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. He joined the bakers' union, which was controlled by the Bund, and owing to his superior education and fluency in several languages, was elected assistant secretary within the union by 1906. At age 15, David was a committed socialist. For his union activies he was exiled to Siberia. He escaped and emigrated to the United States in 1911. While working in New York City, he renewed his union activities and became manager-secretary of Local 10 of the ILGWU in 1921

The reason he left the Cutters Union was that he was disenchanted with the leadership of Morris Sigman by this point. A man who he had elected, and now worked to remove. He thought that Sigman was too abrasive, alienating the more moderate members of the union almost reflexively. Found out, he was barred from the membership and left his post, joining the IWW, NY and becoming an organiser quickly enough.

-John 'Jack' Reed, Doctrine and Discussion: Biographies of our Thinkers

[Mico94]

completely subscribed

John "Jack" Reed is one of my favourite book authors

For the revolution!

[ColonelIronboot]

This is some great stuff, Muffin! I'll be honest to say that Carthage became much less interesting to me once I saw Indiana Jones. I lack a proper sense of humour, I know...

...subscribed, of course.

[Milites]

You just keep that red flag flying! Solidarity for ever!

[KaiserMuffin]

ARTICLE V.

The Label. Section 1. There shall be a Universal Label for the entire Organization. It shall be of a crimson color and always the same in design. The use of the Universal Label shall never be delegated to employers, but shall be vested entirely in our Organization. Except on stickers, circulars and literature proclaiming the merits of the Industrial Workers of the World, and emanating from the general offices of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Universal Label shall be printed only as evidence of work done by I.W.W. members.

At the 1932 congress of the Industrial Workers of the World on the 21st of November in Chicago, Jack Reed took the floor of the congress in order to give a speech, that would change history.

Gentlemen, Ladies, Comrades of the Industrial Workers of the World! It is my honour to speak to you at the opening of this, the 27th Congress of the I.W.W.

When I was contacted by Mr. Mahler about this, I leapt at the opportunity. When the I.W.W. formed they brought into the world the idea of the One Big Union. The Bolsheviks of Russia tried to extend that to the running of a nation, and their experiment was brutally crushed. Their mistake was to attempt to rush Marx. For as Marx said, Democracy is the road to socialism.

[Applause]

We must not take the words of the great man as gospel truth however! After all, he said the English would never rise up, and he was wrong! But that isn't my message! I am here to speak to you, the workers of the I.W.W. You are the largest Union in these States of America and if you will forgive me a dream the nucleus about which we shall create a change! A change that will bring Syndicalism to America!

[Applause]

The 'One Big Union' needs to get bigger! I propose that the I.W.W. joins with those Union's who are willing, to form the Comibined Syndicates of America! Today will be a red letter day in the annals of history, comrades, for today an idea is born!

He was cheered to for almost half an hour.

-Upton Sinclair, The Birth of a Movement