The Digital Dispatch

From NOEBIE.net

Inspiration

If It Were Not For You

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e-v-debs

I would have you make up your minds that there is nothing that you cannot do for yourselves. You do not need the capitalist. He could not exist an instant without you. You would just begin to live without him. You do everything and he has everything; and some of you imagine that if it were not for him, you would have no work. As a matter of fact, he does not employ you at all; you employ him to take from you what you produce, and he faithfully sticks to his task. If you can stand it, he can: and if you don’t change this relation, I am sure he won’t. You make the automobile, he rides in it. If it were not for you, he would walk; and if it were not for him, you would ride.

– Eugene V. Debs

We Can Be Together

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This has long been one of my favorite Jefferson Airplane songs, and I love this demo version from Paul Kantner. It’s amazing that all of the harmonic and rhythmic elements of the song were there right from the start.

I wasn’t able to find proper guitar tabs for this online, but as nearly as I can tell, he’s dropped both E strings on the guitar to D, so I’m experimenting with that tuning this week.

A Braver, A Saner and Truer Thing

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casement

Where all your rights have become only an accumulated wrong, where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to gather the fruits of their own labours, and, even while they beg, to see things inexorably withdrawn from them – then, surely, it is a braver, a saner and truer thing to be a rebel, in act and in deed, against such circumstances as these, than to tamely accept it, as the natural lot of men.

– Sir Roger Casement

Solidarity Forever Centennial

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On a windblown, gray Chicago day 100 years ago, January 17, 1915, Ralph Chaplin left his home on the South Side for a raucous, poor person’s rally at the city’s famous women’s center, Hull House. He asked a visiting friend he’d met organizing coal miners with Mother Jones to listen to the lyrics of a new tune he had been working on. Here’s the story behind one of the most beloved Labor Hymns.

Read the article: ‘Solidarity Forever’ Written 100 Years Ago, Today | Labor Notes.