A Conversation With Laura Barrett of Interfaith Worker Justice

Religion and Socialism Podcast Episode One - A Conversation with Professor Gary Dorrien

The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. About two dozen people, including miners’ wives and children, were killed. The chief owner of the mine, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was widely criticized for the incident.

The massacre, the seminal event in the Colorado Coalfield War, resulted in the violent deaths of between 19 and 26 people; reported death tolls vary but include two women and eleven children, asphyxiated and burned to death under a single tent. The deaths occurred after a daylong fight between militia and camp guards against striking workers. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, which lasted from September 1913 through December 1914. The strike was organized by the United Mine Workers of America against coal mining companies in Colorado. The three largest companies involved were the Rockefeller family-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, and the Victor-American Fuel Company.

In retaliation for Ludlow, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of mines over the next ten days, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 40-mile front from Trinidad to Walsenburg. The entire strike would cost between 69 and 199 lives. Thomas G. Andrews described it as the “deadliest strike in the history of the United States”, commonly referred to as the Colorado Coalfield War.

The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Historian Howard Zinn described the Ludlow Massacre as “the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history”. Congress responded to public outcry by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the incident. Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day.

The Ludlow site, 18 miles northwest of Trinidad, Colorado, is now a ghost town. The massacre site is owned by the United Mine Workers of America, which erected a granite monument in memory of the miners and their families who died that day. The Ludlow Tent Colony Site was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 16, 2009, and dedicated on June 28, 2009. Modern archeological investigation largely supports the strikers’ reports of the event.

The Communist Manifesto (originally Manifesto of the Communist Party) is an 1848 political pamphlet by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London (in German as Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei) just as the revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, the Manifesto was later recognised as one of the world’s most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and then-present) and the problems of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of communism’s potential future forms.

The Communist Manifesto summarises Marx and Engels’ theories about the nature of society and politics, that in their own words, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. It also briefly features their ideas for how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism.

In 2013, The Communist Manifesto was registered to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme with the Capital, Volume I.

People have said nice things about their ETOC experience. The ETOC 2 Day Training is really good. After we first got trained we sent people who had missed it to subsequent trainings.

So your ATU is/was part of ETOC’s Mentorship Program. What does this mean? Your ATU is connected to the larger tenants movement.

As long as you have 3+ core TU organizers and some observable commitment to building an ATU, then we let any group join ETOC Mentorship.

ETOC stands for Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee. The purpose of ETOC is to create new autonomous tenant unions. ETOC is part of the Housing Justice Commision (HJC), which is part of DSA.

ETOC’s Mentorship Program has 5 Phases. Phase 1: Pre-configuration – consolidate working & process norms such as recurring meetings, socials, and how to onboard new members Phase 2: Inquiry – review popular outreach approaches, frame organizing convos that involve the law, and canvas as a tenant in your block or building Phase 3: TU Skeleton – minimal operations as a dues-collecting member organization with a public purpose and outward-facing materials Phase 4: Fight – conduct pressure campaigns against landlords as a mass organization where tenants lead their own struggle and not as a service org Phase 5: TU Formation – formalize decision-making procedures, define political line that unites multiple tendencies, and streamline procedures to enable new member involvement as TU grows