On this day, 17 May 1949, brick factory worker and former Resistance member Maria Margotti was killed by Carabinieri – Italian paramilitary police. The previous day she stood on a picket line of agricultural workers, along with other women, attempting to stop scabs replacing the strikers. Police attacked them particularly violently.
So on 17 May a demonstration was organised protesting against the police violence. The Carabinieri opened fire on the crowd with machine guns and killed Maria Margotti. She was 34 years old.
Her death caused mass outrage and spurred an escalation in opposition and resistance to the post-war state and its anti-working class policies. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1427969450721534/?type=3
If there is any damage to the unit when you move in, DOCUMENT IT. Take photos and make sure they’re dated.
If something breaks while you live in the unit, and you can’t fix it easily yourself, REPORT IT. Make the landlord deal with it.
Document what the unit looks like when you move out, before the final inspection–because landlords can and will try to fake damage. Have proof of what damage was yours, if any, and what damage was not.
Landlords will try to fuck you out of every penny you have, including in ways that are horribly illegal. Don’t let them.
A landlord MAY NOT keep your deposit over ‘normal wear and tear’. They may ONLY collect on something that is YOUR FAULT. They cannot charge for carpet wearing down or needing a new coat of paint after a few years, or the furnace needing a replacement because it’s old. They can charge you for punching a hole in the wall that you never fix, or spilling paint on the carpet requiring a specialized cleaning or replacement. And they may ONLY keep what covers the repairs (If insufficient, then and only then may they keep the whole deposit, as in your deposit did not cover the damage you caused).
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS AS A TENANT. You landlord MUST return your deposit unless it was damage you directly caused, and ONLY the amount needed to fix the damage, and not one penny more.
The General Defense Committee is the mutual aid and community defense arm of the Industrial Workers of the World, and it’s really cool! A GDC local will coordinate things like fundraising, legal council, jail support, activist training, and community defense & outreach. Pretty neat, huh?
“The capitalist class of bosses, financiers, landlords, and their cops wage relentless and violent class war upon the working class. The General Defense Committee (GDC) is a committee of and supports the revolutionary unionism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The GDC’s goal is to defend and support the entire working class, divided and under attack by those who wage class war against us. We therefore promote, through organization, action, and outreach, a mass, non-sectarian defense of the class, in order to build a self-organized working class that treats differences as strengths and opportunities to live in solidarity. Community Self Defense means we intend to build our revolutionary community precisely by defending it and the earth on which we live.
Our power as a class will never come from our possession of wealth, but from our ability to organize the class to defend ourselves. We must secure defense against legal attacks, but do not imagine that legal and financial defense alone are sufficient. Any revolutionary union that does not expect oppression from the master class, and organize to meet it, has failed to learn from past waves of repression.
We say defense means organized action taken explicitly to defend members of the class against the different forms of oppression that structure our society. Our membership expects the GDC to be an arena of mutual education through mutual struggle. Exploiters rely upon the fractured unity of the working class. By standing in solidarity across and directly attacking the diverse oppressions of the class, we intend to embody the notion that an injury to one really is an injury to all, and to openly use our defense to build the resilience, strength, and fighting spirit of the working class. Because the class war is not limited to the workplace, our defense of the class cannot be limited to the workplace. Oppressions like racism and sexism structure class oppression and division. Both degrade the solidarity members of the working class should have for each other, and are predicated on acts of violence within the class, and structures of violence organized by the state. We are against all oppressions. By organizing against the diverse oppressions of the working class, and centering our revolutionary and anti-capitalist foundations, we intend to directly overcome those divisions. Through this struggle we advance the goal of an anti-capitalist revolution by building the size, solidarity, and strength of working class.
The oppressed do not determine the grounds of their liberation; those grounds are chosen by the oppressors, whose warfare upon our class results in exclusion, harm, and death. We intend to meet our oppressors on whatever grounds we must, in order to complete the revolution against the capitalism that accelerates not only our exploitation throughout the world, but our entire world’s ecological peril. We reject sterile bureaucratic or legalistic restrictions on the revolutionary demands with which our union and our world is faced, recognizing that our history includes failed attempts to pretend allegiance to the state and capitalism. We make no pretense. We will defend and support each other.
The General Defense Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World demands hope and bravery of its membership, so that we can build and organize the class that is worthy of the revolution that we must make.”
The GDC is a project of the Industrial Workers of the World, but you don’t have to be an IWW member to get involved as long as you’re in agreement with the principles of anticapitalism, antifascism, and workers’ rights. All you have to do is contact your nearest IWW branch or head on over to https://iww.org/projects/gdc/join. There you’ll find where to sign up, a directory of established branches and locals, and how to get in touch to start your own GDC Local or International GDC Group if there’s not already one near you!
Farm equipment association going hard w the truisms
This is the most southern gothic thing I have fucking seen
This actually makes me really sad
“A six-inch layer of topsoil” yeah when you’re gardening in a residential backyard where everything above the subsoil was scraped off and used for landfill during development and the soil ecology never got a chance to recover
Or growing in an agricultural zone where the subsoil has been so thoroughly ploughpanned that the aquifer won’t refill no matter how much it rains and your crops’ roots can’t develop properly and your topsoil blows away during the summer
I’m sorry, I just…. it was never supposed to be like this and we have done Some Shit to the dirt over the past 528 years or so
On this day, 17 May 1972, 10,000 schoolchildren in the UK walked out on strike in protest against corporal punishment: particularly the use of the cane. When they attempted to occupy Trafalgar Square, police moved in and dispersed the young people and began arresting organisers.
Within two years, London state schools banned corporal punishment. The rest of the country followed in 1987.
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We have other anniversaries today about Japan, Albania, Germany and more. For all of them follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wrkclasshistoryhttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1427788534072959/?type=3
1. You can have and transmit Coronavirus without symptoms.
2. A person can be asymptomatic– i.e. carrying Coronavirus but never fall ill, or presymptomatic– i.e. someone who is infected with Coronavirus but has not yet started to show symptoms.
3. Average symptom onset is around 5 days, though it can be as long as 14 days.
4. !!!Carriers of Coronavirus shed viral particles MOST AGGRESSIVELY BEFORE THEY FALL ILL!!. It is not just the ‘sick’ who are contagious! In the 72-48 hours before a presymptomatic carrier falls ill they are MOST contagious, with viral shed lessening as a person becomes sicker.
5. Therefore, plenty of ‘healthy’ people may be some of the most contagious.
6. This is why the wearing of masks is being pushed again and more strongly: Not to keep you from getting Covid– but to keep you from SPREADING it.
Please, if you must go out, WEAR A MASK WEAR A MASK WEAR A MASK. THE CDC IS NOW EMPLORING ALL WHO DO GO OUT OF THEIR HOMES TO WEAR A CLOTH MASK TO REDUCE TRANSMISSION.
Yeah well…if it’s not an N95 respirator, it won’t do you any good. On the upside, I can wear a hijab and niqab and my coworkers won’t be weirded out.
Right now, homemade masks can be a HUGE step in protecting one another in public. A face mask does not need to be medical grade in order to be effective, especially if the alternative is leaving your home bare faced.
Homemade masks aren’t perfect, and they still require people to observe proper PPE protocol, but this is not the time to scoff at safety precautions. Every bit makes a difference, and this is more than just a bit.
Maryland opened up a little and people are walking around without masks and are not social distancing. And yet babies and young kids are being afflicted with a deadly Kawasaki- like disease and dying. At times I hate my species. I can’t believe how selfish people are.
