Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 12 2003 @ 04:17 PM CDT

that fucking rules. lucy parsons is amazing. i\'ve been looking for literture by and about her forever. good for you!

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 12 2003 @ 09:05 PM CDT

Not to be confused with the Albert Parsons Project... ;-)

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 12 2003 @ 09:08 PM CDT

lucy parsons broke with almost all anarchists over the issues of free love and the bolshevik seizure of state power (she was opposed to the first, and celebrated the second). she had her son incarcerated in a mental institution until his death. she joined the communist party in 1939, many years after it became abundantly clear that stalinism was a counter-revolutionary force and after the comintern had done its best to guarantee that anarchism had--in her words--\"no future.\" this is not the kind of legacy that anarchists should celebrate. perhaps this project is celebrating the pre-1919 lucy parsons? perhaps this anarchist labor outfit is celebrating the fact that parsons was present at the founding of the iww? who knows? but those of us who know something about history and the role of various people within it will continue to point out the shortcomings of idols and heroes.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 12 2003 @ 09:26 PM CDT

She didn\'t break with most anarchists around the issue of \'free love\'. She only broke with certain anarchists, such as Emma Goldman. For the record, many anarchists disagreed with many aspects of Emma Goldman\'s own brand of anarchism... Alexander Berkman, Voltarine De Cleyre, Kropotkin, John Most, Hipployte Havel, etc.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 12 2003 @ 11:29 PM CDT

Lucy Parson is one of my favorite Communists. She had an indomitable spirit and always kept her eyes on the prize. She had the courage to break with her semi-anarchist convictions, along with many of the great IWW organizers like Big Bill Haywood.

Truly a hero of the ages. And she wasn\'t an anarchist. You don\'t get to poach the cool commies for yourself. :-)

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 12 2003 @ 11:47 PM CDT

C\'mon, anyone who nows the slightest bit of knowledge about Lucy Parsons knows that she had no fixed allegiences to any ideology other than Class War. When much of the anarchist movement abandoned mass organizing among the working class for lifestylism (ahem, Emma Goldman) she gavitated toward pure syndicalism. When the syndicalists split and could no longer deliver the goods, she turned to the Communist Party - who, in the wake of 1917, carried out very aggressive and militant union activity and mass organizing in the United States.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 13 2003 @ 09:01 AM CDT

I have the Albert Parsons Project website...

If anyone want to do anything useful with it, let me know...

I intended to, but you know that goes...

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 13 2003 @ 02:46 PM CDT

It\'s absolutely amazing that anarchists would sit around wasting their time bashing Lucy Parsons, as a \"tireless authoritarian\" no less. She spent her entire life at the forefront of movements for social change, always fighting on the side of the poor, challenging authority until the day she died. Her communist affiliation was short-lived, at the very end of her 89 year life, and only after the anarchist movement could no longer provide a serious base of support to help fight on behalf of poor working people. She never wrote, spoke or was a powerful supporter of communism like she was for anarchism and class struggle for most of her life. And she was definitely not a \"tireless authoritarian\" - that\'s a completely ridiculous statement. We should keep in mind the bigger picture. Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, JW Flemming and countless others were drawn to anarchism because of the Haymarket affair, an event which no one would have even heard of if it wasn\'t for her tireless legacy. After the Haymarket affair she dedicated everything she had to fighting for the poor. Regardless of her political affiliations at the end of her life, Lucy Parsons was a true class warrior, always concerned with the movement and not about her own fame or publicity, she had a powerful impact on anarchist and labor movements worldwide. We should also consider how much she contributed to the anarchist movement and labor history in general, admire her courage as a women of color standing up to power, and remember the good she\'s done in the history of social movements. Besides, anybody the Chicago police department labels \"more dangerous than a thousand rioters\" deserves the respect of anarchists, wouldn\'t you agree?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 13 2003 @ 02:07 PM CDT

Lucy Parsons denied that she was Black for her whole life. When anarchists make such a big deal out of her it smells of desperate tokenism.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 13 2003 @ 12:42 PM CDT

Or the Alan Parsons Project...

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 13 2003 @ 12:58 PM CDT

pretty nifty trick of anachronization--making EG a \"lifestylist.\" such a term was invented some 50 years after EG died you idiot. EG never abandonded mass organizing among the working class either; she and other libertarian communists advocated the self-organization of the workers outside the formation of trade unions. in case you hadn\'t noticed, trade unions (yet even the holy CNT) negotiated with the bosses in order to secure certain benefits for themselves, like legal existence. this makes them labor brokers for capitalists; they guarantee a semi-docile labor force in exchange for the right to represent organized workers. this is called politics and corruption. add to that the counter-revolutionary role played by trade union formations throughout history, especially after 1914...
in short, your anarcho-sectarianism will not go without comment. i\'ll take one EG (a tireless exposer of authoritarianism) over a hundred lucy parsons (a tireless authoritarian) any day.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 13 2003 @ 09:08 PM CDT

fuck that. just because the cops think someone is dangerous doesn\'t mean that anarchists should uncritically support her, let alone claim her as one of our own. that\'s the most idiotic criterion, but wholly fitting with what passes for anarchism these days. so much for \"reason.\" also, i am one person, not \"anarchists.\" and i wasn\'t \"bashing\" parsons--i was merely pointing out her personal shortcomings form an anti-authoritarian position. it is possible to be a fearless fighter on behalf of poor and working class people AND still be an authoritarian. your objections are unconvincing. most stalinist rank and file activists in the 20s and 30s would fall under the same category as parsons, if we follow your lead. and they still had bad politics. so did parsons.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 13 2003 @ 09:29 PM CDT

Lucy Parsons was a freedom fighter. She wasn\'t perfect, but neither was Kropotkin (a WWI supporter) or Proudhon (a sexist), but she did dedicate her life to social justice causes, always working to defend the poor. Despite her affiliation with the CP at the end of her life their is no evidence (try to find some) that shows she was an authoritarian. She didn\'t move to Russia and start throwing anarchists in prison, she fought on behalf of labor always, as an anarchist, a communist or just plain rebel. We should learn from her life and the struggles she was a part of try to see what we can do better. Everything else is divisive.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 14 2003 @ 02:54 AM CDT

That seems fair to me.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 14 2003 @ 02:55 AM CDT

you caught that too?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 14 2003 @ 03:02 AM CDT

It\'s not a Prom Queen competition. Emma Goldman was a great one. She turned me onto all kinds of ideas, but mainly gave me comfort in my own decision to live this life as a free person. She demanded we live free, not just fight for some future perfection. Good idea. I disagree on her views of the state and the earlier years of the Soviet Union as well. But so what? Is that really her great contribution?

She put women\'s liberation, not \"suffrage\" or good nannies for the wives of the rich

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 14 2003 @ 09:49 AM CDT

let me get this straight... pointing out the inconsistencies of a person\'s political life is divisive? are you saying that pointing out that kropotkin was in favor of an imperialist war or that proudhon disliked women (and plenty of others too) is divisive? all i\'ve been trying to point out is that parsons was not an anarchist, either an imperfect one or a great one. she had bad politics. she may have led and participated in plenty of campaigns for the betterment of poor people, but as i have pointed out before, so did plenty of stalinists in the 20\'s and 30\'s--and they had bad politics too. as for parsons being authoritarian, how about her sending her son to the loony bin? how about her uncritical support for the bolshevik state? how about her work inside the trade union apparatus? are you hero worshippers that blind? oh i forgot. lucy parsons was a woman of color (another anachronism), so she is beyond criticism. tokenists.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 14 2003 @ 01:12 PM CDT

Nicely said.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 14 2003 @ 02:51 PM CDT

Parsons was not an anarchist? Really? What does it take to be an anarchist? Let

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 14 2003 @ 03:12 PM CDT

Exactly.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 14 2003 @ 11:20 PM CDT

Dead on Hagbard.

I\'m still waiting for some one to back up the charge that \"Lucy Parsons denied that she was Black for her whole life. \"

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 15 2003 @ 12:02 AM CDT

Yes, very nicely put, Hagbard. Couldn\'t have put it better myself.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 15 2003 @ 12:27 AM CDT

Huh? It\'s widely known that Lucy Parsons was an anarchist.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 15 2003 @ 03:06 AM CDT

Chuck

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 15 2003 @ 09:31 AM CDT

sorry buddy, but if you actually read something by parsons during the most active phase of her campaigning (teens through 30\'s), you will find little or no mention of anarchism, anarchists, or anarchy (at least in a positive sense). one of the main ways to identify an anarchist is to discover if they have used the label to identify themselves. parsons didn\'t do this for the last almost 40 years of her life--for good reason.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 16 2003 @ 01:25 AM CDT

Lucy was a memeber of the Communist Party, which was much more radical and connected to building workers movements back then. By the Depression, there was almost no anarchist movement to speak of. Lucy Parsons was also most prominent in those years before revolutionary Marxism, or Communism, split from the comfortable-with-capitalism-type Social Democrats. She was a revolutionary. In the 30s, organized revolutionaries were mostly in the CP. By the 60s, there were no revolutionaries left in the CP and it was run by the Russians.

Isn\'t this widely known?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 15 2003 @ 11:39 AM CDT

There is nothing wrong with studying the life of Lucy Parsons or saying that on the whole she was a great fighter for freedom and justice.

What IS tokenistic is putting together a pantheon of anarchist saints that is more ethnically diverse than the actual history of the anarchist movement and then not talking honestly and critically about WHY the movement has been (and still is) so white or why one of its most prominent Black figures denied her Blackness.

Much (though obviously not all) of the history of anarchism consists of the biographies of individual anarchists rather than the histories of organizations or mass movements. So Lucy Parsons is not alone in this respect. But I think the study of her life should be cause to reflect on the disconnect between the anarchist movement and what has been historically the greatest engine of social struggle in the U.S., the Black freedom movement.

A figure that hasn\'t gotten the same attention as Parsons, but who also deserves study is the Puerto Rican anarchist, feminist and labor organizer Luisa Capetillo. She is much better known to Puerto Rican nationalists than to white U.S. anarchists. Again however it is worth considering what caused the eclipse of the anarchist politics she represented in the Puerto Rican struggle.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 15 2003 @ 12:53 PM CDT

Lucy was often alienated from the anarchist community, just as she is being alienated from it right now. Too bad. But regardless of what she claimed to be or not, there is no denying her contribution to the anarchist movement, as she was almost solely responsible for the international attention brought to the haymarket affair, which sparked anarchism\'s growth internationally. For anyone who wants to read a lecture by Lucy Parsons on her beliefs in anarchism see the link below:

http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/writings/principles_of_anarchism.html

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 15 2003 @ 01:10 PM CDT

I have yet to come across any writings or lectures by Lucy Parsons in which she openly supports Bolshevism, as has been claimed by several people in this commentary. If anyone knows of such texts by Parsons I\'d like to know about them and read them. Here\'s what she had to say about anarchism:

\"For all who are at all familiar with history know that men will abuse power when they possess it, for these and other reasons, I, after careful study, and not through sentiment, turned from a sincere, earnest, political Socialist to the non-political phase of Socialism, Anarchism, because in its philosophy I believe I can find the proper conditions for the fullest development of the individual units in society, which can never be the case under government restrictions...

The philosophy of anarchism is included in the word \"Liberty\"; yet it is comprehensive enough to include all things else that are conducive to progress. No barriers whatever to human progression, to thought, or investigation are placed by anarchism; nothing is considered so true or so certain, that future discoveries may not prove it false; therefore, it has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, \"Freedom.\" Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully...


What we anarchists contend for is a larger opportunity to develop the units in society, that mankind may possess the right as a sound being to develop that which is broadest, noblest, highest and best, unhandicapped by any centralized authority, where he shall have to wait for his permits to be signed, sealed, approved and handed down to him before he can engage in the active pursuits of life with his fellow being.\"

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 15 2003 @ 01:26 PM CDT

I agree with Day when he says

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 16 2003 @ 01:32 AM CDT

Here\'s a few webpages that confirm her journey from anarchism to communism that I found in about 1 minute:

http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/parsonsl-bio.html

http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/PP/fpa68.html

And, of course, the very website this was advertising, the Lucy Parsons Project mentions it only to dismiss her for moving with the vast bulk of the anarchist movement (that stayed revolutionaryt) into the CP:

http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/about_lucyparsons.html


Before you demand sources, why don\'t you try looking. It takes less time and is more intellectually honest.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 16 2003 @ 04:11 AM CDT

I don\'t think anyone\'s denying Lucy joined the CP, that\'s a well-established fact we can easily verify. But joining the CP during the 30s to help organize labor does not necessarily mean you were a bolshevik or stallinist supporter. And it\'s certainly not enough of a reason to disregard Lucy\'s immense contribution to the anarchist movement.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 19 2003 @ 04:24 PM CDT

I think its funny that the Marxists are trying to claim Lucy Parsons as
a \"communist.\" She was for the bulk of her life an anarchist. She, like
a lot of radicals, became a member of the Communist Party. But that
does not negate her earlier anarchism. Its a shame she ended her years
supporting a dictatorship of the communists. And let\'s not forget that she
remained a Communist even after the rise of Stalin. Not anything to be
proud of, from being an anarchist to being a Stalinist!

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 23 2003 @ 11:19 PM CDT

Thanks for deconstructing the typical slurs from Chris Day. But take it a step further.

If we are going to \"...reflect on the disconnect between the anarchist movement and what has been historically the greatest engine of social struggle in the U.S., the Black freedom movement.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 24 2003 @ 01:28 PM CDT

Actually, joining the CP in the 30s meant EXACTLY that you were a Bolshevik and a Stalinist. A real life Bolshevik, not the kooky chariacture promoted by anarchists. Bolshevism, to use the 70 year old lingo, was all about workers revolution. Lucy joined the team to get in the game. Nothing wrong with that.

(Of course, joining the CP today is like joining a creepier version of the Democratic Party. But, that\'s a whole other discussion.)

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 24 2003 @ 01:34 PM CDT

I think Chris Day\'s point, even if I disagree with the use of superlatives to make it, is that the Black freedom struggle has consistently cut to the core of basic issues in all of our lives.

It\'s not just the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s. Looking back, from the days of CP hegemony to Reconstruction to the abolitionist movement, Black emancipation has been the cornerstone of every great social struggle in America. It is a fact.

Class based struggles that have ignored or marginalized black people have always been humstrung by their own racism. And every time Black people have made gains, they have benefitted everyone. Affirmative Action, public schools, desegregation of public life, democratic rights in the South and so on. The list is pretty considerable.

Chris isn\'t making a slur, he\'s observing the historical reality. The implications of this are definitely up for debate, but don\'t act like he\'s just talking smack.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 24 2003 @ 01:39 PM CDT

Why is it \"funny\" communists are laying claim to Lucy Parsons? I don\'t know of any communist group that has ever done such a thing.

However, there is something totally disrespectful to the actual woman in ignoring what she did for the the final decades of her life. Her migration into the communist movement is something anarchists have always done

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 24 2003 @ 05:26 PM CDT

As Robert Drake has already pointed out Chris\' characterization of the Parsons project as

\"putting together a pantheon of anarchist saints that is more ethnically diverse than the actual history of the anarchist movement\"

does not reflect the reality. Since it refers to present it is not historical either. considering that Chris\' statement is both false and derogatory, I think slur is the proper term for it.

I think your typing may have gotten ahead of your reading.

By the way, do you consider Black emancipation to have been a cornerstone of the labor struggles of the 1930\'s?

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