When you’re a promiscuous news feeder like me, you come up with all kinds of things. My secret recipe is I google “news iran” and the current date and then the world is my oyster. The other day I stumbled upon an item from a socialist website on the trial of some Iranian union activists and on the dire straits the labor movement in Iran is in, a situation which has become extremely critical in the last two weeks.
I was shocked. I shouldn’t’ve been shocked–that’s ridiculous–but I was because I realized that these days I rarely think in terms of labor. And I realized that that was a kind of betrayal of my values because it is laborers who make our world, and that was something I never allowed myself to forget when I was younger and more influenced by the “Old Left.” But here on my keyboard in front of my sleek smooth plastic screen I seem to have somehow forgotten.
I think in a way it is the globalization that makes me forget and that’s what it’s supposed to do. And I wonder if some of you may have forgotten too, because people here don’t seem to talk much about the labor movement in Iran. So I decided to write a blog on it, but it was harder than I thought it would be. It was difficult to piece the pieces together and of course my being unable to read anything but the most elementary Persian didn’t help. And I’m really not used to writing things these days that require research, as it were…so…I’m almost done and I’ll post it shortly.
Meantime I remembered that a while back I’d wanted to post one of my favorite songs, which is called “Bells of Rhymney”. I heard it thirty years ago when my boyfriend took me to a concert of Pete Seeger, the folk singer and political and eco-activist who became famous in the 50’s. The song is about the coal miners of Wales and their struggles for justice. And it is beautiful. The bells are the bells of the churches of different villages that each in their own way sing the plight and the hope of the miners. The song mesmerized me. I never forgot it. But I never heard it again until I youtubed it a couple of months ago.
I found the only Pete Seeger video on youtube to be inadequate because I feel the video doesn’t suit the song. And I found a version by the Byrds from the 60’s but of course it was very “poppy” and also the most biting words against the Capitalist mine owners were mssing. I imagined the Byrds arguing heatedly with their producers about it, but the fact is, the stanza was expunged. And then I found this John Denver version and it was perfect. It was a John Denver whose power and intensity I’d never known before.
And so I thought as I’m completing this blog on the Iranian labor movement, I should post the Denver video. i think part of the reason you hear so little about labor these days is that, to employ a “Margeism”, labor isn’t “sexy” in this “sexy” high-tech world of ours. And the more I read about them the more I realize that no, there’s nothing sexy about workers’ struggles in Iran. And at the risk of sounding grossly politically incorrect, let’s be honest, isn’t there something “sexy” about women’s rights advocates and student protesters and incarcerated journalists and bloggers, and about the Bahai (I’ll get creamed for that one for sure)…something…appealing? But there isn’t much “appealing” about workers’ movements, is there?
Except that we owe workers absolutely everything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUc41gKw0iQ
John Denver (1943-1997) died in a plane crash piloting his own plane shortly after taking off from Monterey Peninsula. “It is not life’s length, but its depth.”–Ralph Waldo Emerson
