Monthly Archives: August 2017

For seventy years, Ella Reeve Mother Bloor was a union organizer and womens rights activist in left-wing political parties in the United States. Peripatetic in her search for the organizational path to socialism, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I, she joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). In the 1920s and 1930s, Bloor became the partys most prominent female leader.

Largely forgotten today due to Americas ongoing anticommunist crusade, Bloor remained committed to womens equality and uplifting working people both of which she believed only could happen by advancing beyond capitalism. Her life story is as fascinating as it is educational.

Ella Reeve was born on Staten Island in 1862 during the Civil War. She grew up in middle-class suburbs but when her mother died during her twelfth childbirth, the seventeen-year-old Ella took over the care of her four youngest siblings. Bloor first became interested in political reform as a teenager, influenced by her great-uncle, who was an abolitionist, freethinker, and Unitarian.

While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, she read Marx and Engels and witnessed the brutal lives of Philadelphias working-class women and men, who struggled to survive while a small group at the top lived in aristocratic opulence. (Another future CPUSA leader, William Z. Foster, grew up in nearby South Philadelphia, where in 1895 he learned about class struggle by building barricades in solidarity with striking transit workers.)

She first married at twenty and had seven children, though three died in infancy a tragic if common reality in her time. Then, one day in the late 1880s, as she wrote in her autobiography, I suddenly realized that in spite of all the things I planned to do I was well on the way to become just a household drudge.

She explored suffrage, prohibition, and, more generally, womens rights while searching for something to believe in. She spoke at her Unitarian church and joined the reformist Womens Christian Temperance Union, a leading advocate for both prohibition and womens suffrage. In 1896, she divorced, moved to New York, and to help support herself authored the childrens books Three Little Lovers of Nature (1895) and Talks About Authors and Their Work (1899).

During this era, she married Louis Cohen, who shared her commitment to socialism. With him, Bloor had two more children before divorcing again in 1905. She chose to remain single supporting herself and six children until, in 1930, marrying one last time, to a communist farmer on the High Plains.

As Bloor later wrote, she increasingly identified the political and economic inequalities of women with the oppression of the working masses and came to see socialism as the solution to these twinned problems.

In 1897 Bloor became a founding member of the Social Democracy of America, established by her friends Eugene V. Debs, then the nations most famous labor leader, and Victor Berger, who later became the first Socialist ever elected to Congress.

When Debs founded a paper called the Social Democrat, he requested Bloor write its childrens column, which she did. Demonstrating an ever more militant streak, she soon joined the rival Socialist Labor Party (SLP), led by Daniel De Leon. While many, past and present, considered De Leon a divisive ultra-leftist, there was no dominant left party in the late 1890s. As Bloor recalled, The Socialist Labor Party was a revolutionary party in those days and De Leon, its leader, was a brilliant theoretician and speaker, a courageous fighter against capitalism.

She worked for its New York Labor News Company, publisher of revolutionary books and pamphlets. The Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, the SLP trade union affiliate, elected her to its general executive board and assigned her to organize streetcar workers in New Jersey and Philadelphia. The SLP contained members of the old Knights of Labor and, in 1905, folded itself into the newly created Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), though this merger was short-lived, as the groups split in 1908. By this time, Bloors commitment to radical unionism and a political path to socialism appeared set, though her specific allegiances continued to shift.

In 1902, she joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA), in which she spent eighteen years organizing unions. She led strikes of hatters, miners, needle-workers, and steelworkers all while raising six children. She also worked for both the SPA and various womens organizations as a paid organizer on state and national campaigns for womens suffrage. In 1910, she introduced an amendment at the Socialist Partys congress in support of womens suffrage.

When author and fellow socialist Upton Sinclair started researching wage slavery in the Chicago stockyards, she traveled there with another socialist, Richard Bloor, to assist in this investigation. They posed as a married couple so she used his last name, which for unknown reasons, stuck. In 1906, Sinclair published his best-selling, enormously influential novel The Jungle. In the 1910s, people started calling her Mother, a common honorific for older women, and, henceforth, she became known as Mother Bloor.

In 1913-14, Bloor traveled to Calumet, in Michigans Upper Peninsula, during a major copper miners strike to help the strikers and their families. Her later account of the shocking deaths of seventy-three strikers and their family members, called the Italian Hall tragedy, later became the basis of a famous Woody Guthrie song, 1913 Massacre. Given her importance as an organizer, it is unsurprising that she also was present in 1914 when Colorado National Guardsmen brutally shot and killed at least thirty-six men (striking coalminers), women, and children in the Ludlow massacre, about which Guthrie also wrote.

During World War I, Bloor continued to organize for unions and womens suffrage while opposing the war. During what now is called the First Red Scare, civil liberties increasingly came under assault, so Bloor raised money for and spoke on behalf of those arrested for opposing the war. Part of the left-wing of the SPA, she ran for lieutenant governor of New York.

In 1919, as the SPA split over Bolshevism, Bloor helped found the Communist Labor Party that soon joined the CPUSA. Like millions the world over, the Bolshevik Revolution inspired her to believe that a society prioritizing people rather than profit not only was preferable but possible. In 1921 and 1922 she traveled to Moscow for international gatherings. Back in the US, Bloor worked as a CPUSA organizer, riding the rails with working stiffs while writing articles for Communist papers, including the Daily Worker and Working Woman. She served on the partys Central Committee from 1932 to 1948. In all these capacities, she made a point to highlight womens issues.

Among her many assignments, she wrote for the Labor Defender, the organ of the International Labor Defense (ILD), a civil liberties organization affiliated with the Communist Internationals Red Aid network. Most famously the ILD helped save the lives of the Scottsboro Boys nine African-American boys and men wrongly convicted of raping a white woman from a legal lynching in Alabama in 1931. Bloors writings and activism inspired other women, such as the Red Angel, Elaine Black Yoneda, who quoted Bloor on the need to protect those wrongly accused: We must not fail these fighters, our defenders, those who go to the front.

In 1929 the CPUSA dispatched Bloor, then sixty-seven, to work with struggling farmers in the Great Plains. In South Dakota, she worked as an organizer for the United Farmers League fighting bank foreclosures and organizing mass demonstrations, during which time she met and married Andrew Omholt. With her oldest son (also a communist), she promoted the Farmers Holiday Association, which engineered the Iowa Milk Strike of 1932. In 1934, while protesting on behalf of striking female chicken pluckers in Loup City, Nebraska, Bloor was arrested one of more than thirty such arrests. After appeals failed, the seventy-three-year-old served most of her thirty-day jail sentence.

In 1937 Bloor made her fourth visit to the Soviet Union, this time to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon her return, she published Women in the Soviet Union (1938), a pamphlet praising the Soviet system of child care. In the 1930s and 1940s, the party began to celebrate her birthday and even hosted Mother Bloor picnics, further raising her status beyond the party.

Its fair to ask whether Bloor had doubts about the Soviet Union, the then-leader of the communist project, and communism more generally. By the 1930s, Stalin had demonstrated an utter lack of concern for democracy or human rights, imprisoning and killing millions of his own people. Stalin, and Lenin before him, had also sought to destroy anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, Trotskyists, and other on the Left who questioned Soviet policy, most notoriously in crushing the Kronstadt rebellion.

However, in the 1930s, the Soviet Union and Communist Parties around the world embraced the Popular Front. In the United States, the CPUSA seemed to act quite independently of the Soviet Union and attracted a great many to its ranks and countless more fellow travelers with its bold commitment to working peoples struggles during the Great Depression. Moreover, as demonstrated in the Scottsboro case, American Communists, white and black, boldly led the fight for racial equality and industrial unionism. Bloor, who referred to the CPUSA as her family, was hardly alone in excusing Soviet crimes in the hope that socialism was just around the corner.

In 1940, at the age of seventy-eight, she published her autobiography, We Are Many. In the books introduction, fellow Communist (and former IWW) leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote:

We love and honor this extraordinary American woman as a symbol of militant American farmer and working class, of the forward sweep of women in the class struggle and in our Party, as an example to young and old of what an American Bolshevik should be.

Bloors book also inspired Woody Guthrie to pen songs about rapacious capitalists willing to murder innocent women and children to defeat strikes in the nations copper and coal mines. Mother Bloors outsized role resulted in radical American soldiers writing letters to her from overseas during WWII.

In her autobiography, Bloor touchingly recalled how she knew Walt Whitman as a child, a product of regular visits to an aunt in Camden, New Jersey, discussing her love of riding the ferry between Camden and Philadelphia (decades before a bridge spanned the Delaware River). As she wrote, Perhaps it was on those ferry-boat rides that the course of my life was determined, and that Whitman somehow transferred to me, without words, his own great longing to establish everywhere on earth the institution of the dear love of comrades.

Despite her nickname, which may seem dated and essentialist, Bloor lived a modern feminist life. She divorced several men who didnt bring her happiness and desired something better. She married several times for intellectual and political companions. She supported herself and her children. She fought for suffrage, the premier womens rights cause of the 1890s, until women won the right to vote in 1920. She became a union organizer and socialist, getting to know every prominent leftist of her time and countless ordinary ones too.

By the 1890s, she concluded that womens oppression included both patriarchy and capitalism. Committed to revolutionary change, she believed unions necessary to achieve her long-term goals as well as to improve the immediate lives of workers, women and men. Truly, she predicted the rise of socialist feminism in the 1970s.

Though some might indict such views for being restricted to middle-class white women as Barbara Ehrenreich said in 1975, the term socialist feminism is much too short for what is, after all, really socialist, internationalist, anti-racist, anti-heterosexist feminism Bloors life remains a signpost for all: fight for equality and expect as much in ones own life. Support unions and get others to do so. Strike, as needed. Take risks, even if that means getting arrested. Join the struggle while you can.

Ella Reeve Bloor died on this day in 1951 in Richlandtown, Pennsylvania and was buried in Camden, New Jersey. In tribute, Langston Hughes, the legendary African-American poet, declared, Mother Bloor was in person as sweet and full of sunshine as could be yet she battled the capitalists tooth and nail for seventy years.

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She Battled the Capitalists Tooth and Nail - Jacobin magazine

The government estimates the problem of modern slavery is higher than expected and Anti-slavery International claims the business is "thriving" throughout the UK.

An investigation by Lincolnshire police led to the conviction today, August 11, of 11 people for being part of a modern slavery ring which targeted victims that were vulnerable and homeless - one person was held for 26 years.

The group are set to be sentenced on September 7, 8, 11 and 12 at Nottingham Crown Court for the crime.

What is modern slavery?

In the UK the common form of modern slavery sees people trafficked into forced labour for very little pay.

This applies to a variety of industries but is most commonly seen in agriculture, hospitality, car washes, and manufacturing.

Women may also be trafficked for sex.

Children can also be forced to commit crimes such as petty theft or cannabis production.

Horrific stories of victims held as slaves that helped police snare notorious travellers revealed

Who are victims of modern slavery?

Anyone can be a victim of slavery but people who are classed as vulnerable are often targeted. This also includes those who are from a minority and socially excluded groups can also be targeted.

The Government says that two-thirds of victims of modern slavery are women and one in four victims is a child.

A variety of things can contribute to someone being a victim of modern slavery this can include lack of education, poverty and limited opportunities at home.

How are people targeted?

Generally someone is offered what seems like a decent job but then when they start the job the conditions are completely different.

Violence can also be used against the victim once they have started work.

How common is slavery in the UK?

Anti-Slavery International claims it is much more common than people think with around 13,000 being exploited in the UK alone.

But the National Crime Agency have said it's just the tip of the iceberg and there are lots more people up and down the country who are being kept as slaves, but their cases have never come to light.

How can you spot modern slavery?

There are a variety of signs to look out for which may mean that someone is a victim of modern slavery. A person may have false identity.

Director of Anti-slavery International, Aidan McQuade, said: "In terms of observations if you see people living in crowded conditions, they are not using proper work clothes, they are not mixing with other communities, and are driven around from one house to the next.

"If you get a sense they are a slave you need to find out if their identity documents have been taken off them."

He added people also have to find out whether they are paid minimum wage.

To report modern slavery call the government's hot line on 0800 0121 700.

Operation Pottery, which led to the conviction of eleven people in Nottingham Crown Court, was one of the largest investigations of its kind in the country.

It probed the group - largely from the same family of travellers - who targeted victims because they were "vulnerable and homeless".

Some of the victims had learning disabilities or mental health issues, while others were dependent on alcohol or drugs. Some were forced to sign over their homes.

Officers carried out seven raids across Lincolnshire, Nottingham and London simultaneously on September 22, 2014 to smash the slavery ring.

Mr McQuade added it is good news the gang has been convicted.

He said: "The fact this has been going on is not a surprise - it's shocking, but it's not a surprise.

"It's positive that they've been prosecuted and the police have stopped cruelty and it has raised awareness of the issue.

"It does highlight a problem we need to face."

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What is modern slavery and how big is the problem in the UK? - LincolnshireLive

The group said its hotline will enable employees to raise concerns confidentially, without fear of repercussion about colleagues or suppliers. The hotline will be promoted during inductions, on wage slips, in worker handbooks and on noticeboards around its sites across the country.

Trained telephone operators will categorise each call on severity, alerting the appropriate level of management, or Cordants HR, legal or compliance teams, to investigate or respond to the concerns raised. Cordants compliance team will monitor all responses and report back to the groups senior leaders weekly.

Additionally, following the lead of PMP Recruitment, other Cordant brands have committed to becoming Stronger Together business partners.The campaign requires organisations to upload evidence to publicly demonstrate their commitment to tackling hidden labour exploitation.

Yesterday the BBC reported on a warning from the National Crime Agency claiming modern slavery and human trafficking in the UK is "far more prevalent than previously thought," with the NCA estimating there were tens of thousands of victims of modern slavery with cases affecting "every large town and city in the country". The agency added that it has more than 300 live policing operations.

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Cordant hotline allows employees to raise slavery and trafficking concerns - Recruiter

In the past ten years, the world has taken notice in Chinas growing interest for trade and investment in Latin America.

As a major import country for consumer food products, such as cereals, legumes, cattle and processed foods, as well as mineral raw materials and energy, its inevitable for China to focus on resource-rich Latin America. This comes with multiple facets of how each will benefit from building a relationship.

Take note: With China having a GDP value of over 18 percent of the worlds economy, and a 6.9 percent growth in Q1 and Q2 2017, it is without question how great the Chinese economy impacts global markets. In addition, Chinas population is over 1.38 billion, which makes it the most populous country in the world its more than double the total population of all Latin America and more than four times the population of the United States.

On the other hand, Latin America has half the GDP and nearly half the population as China. China is also the third largest exporter and second largest import partner for Latin American goods, including commodities due to the regions arable, agricultural, and resource rich lands. While it is a supplier of raw materials, its lack of industrial manufacturing makes it a prime buyer for Chinas products, such as toys, household goods, clothing, appliances, technologies and more.

Given this information, and since Chinas arable land is less than 13 percent, in the context of a desertification process that has not proved possible to stop, the country has understandably very high levels of demand, and thereby has become a major importer, for raw materials and food, and exporter for consumer products.

In the 2000s, this demand has contributed to growth and economic resilience in Latin America, but the regions slight deceleration due to global economic trends and political transitions in recent years has had a very negative impact on the region and its economic projections.

Furthermore, given its energy needs, China is convinced that it must innovate and lead the way in the search for alternatives to oil. However, since China will continue to rely on oil and raw energy resources until alternatives have been fully developed, its investment in the industry and relationship with Latin America has not faltered, despite losses for Latin American exporters due to a decline in crude oil and iron ore prices. For example, China has committed $65 billion USD for 500,000 barrels of oil per day from the reduced production capacity of PDVSA, a Venezuelan state oil company this is in addition to a number of infrastructure investment projects and a greater quantity of exports to the South American country.

As an exporter for consumer products, Chinas labor force has seen a major influx in industrial jobs. This has caused nearly 400 million Chinese citizens to move from rural areas to urban centers since the end of the 1970s. However, given that supply has not been able to keep up with demand, many of these factory jobs were met with inhumane conditions and dismal wages between 15 and 20 times lower than international averages since inception (aka labor slavery). Currently, although the wage differential gap has lessened, China continues to produce goods at costs well below those of other countries. From this perspective, Chinas huge industrial base, supported by an exploited labor has allowed for the industrial powerhouse to monopolize the market and expand globally, even when the quality of its products is constantly subject to criticism. This issue of labor and humane standards has been the source of endless disputes and negotiations within the World Trade Organization (WTO). Under pressure from their trade unions, several G8 countries have demanded wage homologation to ensure fair trade terms.

In the container import sector, the U.S. reigns with receiving over 20 percent of its goods from China, amounting to 4 percent of the U.S. GDP. This has caused a domino effect for the U.S. originated, number one retail giant in the world, Walmart, to import nearly 80 percent of its consumer goods from China. As low-cost manufacturing and middle-class wealth has expanded in the country, China has also become an important market for many North American companies.

However, as previously noted, inhumane treatment and internal labor pressures is among the most controversial issues for electoral debate in the U.S. and G8 partners.

The rise of China as a great importer and exporter adds to its financial power. To fully convey the tenacious and tremendous climb of their economy to become a main rival of U.S. trade and financial markets, it would take more than the limited space that this article allows. Furthermore, Chinas capacity for buying, selling and financial investment resources has permitted the country to become a systemic and significant player in the Latin American marketplace.

Due to their growing trade relations, Chinese President Xi Jinping developed an ambitious five-year plan from 2015-2019 for exchange with Latin America that includes: $500 billion USD in trade and $250 billion USD in foreign direct investment over its course. This has been more than fulfilled already and China is gaining greater economic influence in the region than the U.S. on a daily basis.

The Chinese model is clearly mercantilist, not political a B2B, you-do-you, I-do-me approach. For example, the Sino-Venezuelan cooperation model previously described has provided the Chvez and Maduro governments with weapons and financial aid, and in turn with a pragmatic silence regarding violations of human rights, political freedoms, and the prevalent hunger and disease that exists in the country. The two countries offer each other mutual voting support in the various multilateral global organizations every time the community of democratic nations tries to demand compliance with international law or human rights.

The big question is how are the benefits of closer relations with China shared? The answer, in most cases, is that the big beneficiary has been China. In Latin America, it has found a secure flow of raw materials, fundamental for its expansion, at prices below the world average. In the case of Mexico, some of the products that it exports to the North American market have been affected by unfair Chinese competition in the form of goods produced with very low-cost workers.

Furthermore, many economists argue that trade with China hinders the process of regional industrialization. This is due to when demand for raw materials increases in price and in effect strengthens local currencies, importing products finished or manufactured from China as opposed to manufacturing it in the home region is economically more attractive. Consequently, another question is if building China relations are perpetuating a dependence on exporting raw materials making Latin American economies more reliant and vulnerable?

As a larger trading partner with China in Latin America, the case of Venezuela is most eloquent in this regard: it shows that China is a ferocious negotiator, especially if it meets with an interlocutor like the governments of Chavez and Maduro, who have sold oil at giveaway prices in exchange for receiving loan payments in advance. In fact, the terms of successive agreements between the two governments, which total almost 500 from 1999 to date, are not publicly known. Diplomats and experts have pointed out that the commitments made by Venezuela violate its own laws, including the authorization of Chinese companies to ignore the Labor Law that prevails for other companies in their relations with Venezuelan workers.

Finally, another issue where China works without limitations is that of corruption. Unlike the U.S., European Union and the United Kingdom, where laws prohibit and penalize companies and citizens for corrupt practices when conducting business in foreign countries, Chinese businesses are able to execute their plans in America Latina free from any oversight in the matter of corruption. It is precisely these aspects of relations with China that are causing alarm, inside and outside Latin America.

Growing relations between Latin America and China is multifaceted. Beyond the short- and medium-term benefits that can be generated by building economic relationship with the Asian giant, commitments and dependencies are being created. In many ways, these are contrary to human rights, labor rights and, finally, the institutional and economic development of our countries. Above all, China-Latin America relations are not projected to change in the coming years despite political transitions and economic changes. Business is business.

In light of this increasing Chinese presence in Latin America, with the issues associated to the same, one question emerges for United States policy makers and business leaders: Shouldn't we strategically increase and prioritize our engagement and partnerships with our neighbors in the Western hemisphere? The answer is obviously yes, but there has been little action. Plus, it might be too late when we start.

Leopoldo Martnez Nucete tweets @lecumberry.

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China in Latin America - HuffPost