Milena Rampoldi, 12/7/2022
How did you discover Joe Hill?
I was a young immigrant in Sweden in the late 60s. Those were the ‘golden years’ of the reigning social democracy, which declared all dissent to be ‘deviance’ to be treated by psychiatry. I identified with the ‘damned of the earth’ and found the reigning Lutheran morality incomparably hypocritical. Those who claimed to want the good of the people had rewritten history, erasing the ‘other workers’ movement', which had fought against capital by anything but peaceful means. Joe Hill was a legendary figure in that ‘other labour movement’. In 1970, I found myself with a few hundred outsiders as an extra in Bo Widerberg's film about Joe Hill, in the southern districts of Stockholm. Until then, all I knew about him was the song sung by Joan Baez at Woodstock. Joe Hill told me that the Swedish working class had not always been the peaceful pachyderm of social democratic representation. Then I discovered Anton Nilsson, ‘the Amalthea man’. This 21-year-old worker had, with 2 comrades, planted a bomb near a ship called the Amalthea, moored in Malmö, which housed British strike-breakers imported by the bosses against a dockers' strike in 1908. Anton Nilsson was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment following an international campaign, led in particular by the International Workers of the World, the union where Joe Hill was active in the USA.
What is Joe Hill telling us today?
Essentially, he is telling us two things: 1. that it is possible to organise the most exploited and the most oppressed in an intelligent and effective way by adapting the forms of organisation to the social reality of those ‘down below’ - migrants, women, the precarious, the unskilled - which is what the IWW did, avoiding any form of social-democratic bureaucracy. That's what the ‘other workers’ movement’ is all about, as opposed to apparatuses like the German DGB, AFL-CIO or the Swedish LO: a movement that sticks to the reality of the class, which is mobile, fluid and changing. 2- We can invent popular, creative, hard-hitting and humorous forms of communication. Joe Hill's songs are a magnificent example of this.
Are there any Joe Hills today?
Not that I know of. Some rappers could be, if they chose to sing with and for the workers who are organising themselves at Amazon, McDonalds, Starbucks, Deliveroo, Uber and all the companies of the ‘new capitalism’, which is only new in its forms.
What would Joe Hill and the IWW have done today?
They would have organised ‘other’ workers by walking on two legs: physical and virtual contact. That's what's happening in China, for example, where young workers in the world's factories, with no union to defend them, are using social media to make demands and organise themselves.
Why the ‘erga omnes’ series?
‘erga omnes’, “For all”, was the motto of the slave rebels led by Spartacus who endangered the Roman Republic between 73 and 71 BC. This collection aims to publish books on the great, sometimes forgotten, figures of logical revolts through the centuries. Others will follow Joe Hill.
- A child of the iron
- Svenskamerika
- From New York to California
- Wobbly!
- Rebel Girl
- A Yankee lawsuit
