Workers Solidarity Movement

Lucy Parsons Newsletter Issue One Summer 2007

Domestic workers in Ireland
Would you accept a job without signing a proper legal contract? A job that means working long days for 400 euro a month doing chores like ironing, cooking, laundering, cleaning a 4 bed house and even mean babysitting four children aged between two and seven years old?

No Justice No Peace
Terence Wheelock’s death is by no means extraordinary, in that his death was one twenty two deaths reported in Garda Custody since 1997. Of these figures, a majority of those who died are under the age of thirty, and, in the case of Brian Rossiter, the victim was just fourteen years old.

ʻBarricading the G8 in Germanyʼ
Read the online account of a Lucy Parsonsʼ member who participated in blocking this years G8 summit in Germany 

Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice.. ..Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality

Who Was Lucy Parsons?

Lucy Parsons was well known for her writings, her courage as a dissi- dent woman of colour, her unbending commitment to social justice, and, most of all her powerful, fiery public speeches. In her time she wrote for many newspapers such as the Libera- tor, an anarchist newspaper that sup- ported the IWW in Chicago. She led tens of thousands of workers into the streets in mass protests, for instance when she organized the Chicago Hun- ger Demonstrations in January 1915, and drew enormous crowds wherever she spoke and was considered a dan- gerous, explosive and robust threat to authorities across the United States.

For over 30 years the police shut down her lectures, often arresting her before she ever got to the podium. The Chicago Police Department at

one point had labelled Lucy Parsons “more dangerous than a thousand ri- oters.” So hearing Lucy speak at all was a rare opportunity. Even after her death in 1942, the state still viewed Lucy Parsons as such threat, that the police seized her library of over 1500 books and all of her personal papers, in an attempt to prevent her ideas of freedom and equality from reaching people.

Parsons was quoted in saying, “My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production.” Parsons had antici- pated the sit down strikes in the US and, later, workersʼ factory takeovers in Argentina.