American workers had begun organizing into unions following the Civil War, and by the 1880s many thousands were organized into unions, most notably the Knights of Labor.
In the spring of 1886 workers struck at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago, the factory that made farm equipment including the famous McCormick Reaper made by Cyrus McCormick. The workers on strike demanded an eight-hour workday, at a time when 60-hour workweeks were common. The company locked out the workers and hired strikebreakers, a common practice at the time.
On May 1, 1886, a large May Day parade was held in Chicago, and two days later, a protest outside the McCormick plant resulted in a person being killed.
A mass meeting was called to take place on May 4, to protest what was seen as brutality by the police. The location for the meeting was to be Haymarket Square in Chicago, an open area used for public markets.
At the May 4th meeting a number of radical and anarchist speakers addressed a crowd of approximately 1,500 people. The meeting was peaceful, but the mood became confrontational when the police tried to disperse the crowd.
As scuffles broke out, a powerful bomb was thrown. The bomb landed and exploded, unleashing shrapnel. The police drew their weapons and fired into the panicked crowd.
Seven policemen were killed, and it’s likely that most of them died from police bullets fired in the chaos, not from the bomb itself. Four civilians were also killed. More than 100 persons were injured.
The public outcry was enormous. Press coverage contributed to a mood of hysteria. Two weeks later, the cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Magazine, one of the most popular publications in the US, featured an illustration of the “bomb thrown by anarchists” cutting down police and a drawing of a priest giving the last rites to a wounded officer in a nearby police station.
The rioting was blamed on the labor movement, specifically on the Knights of Labor, the largest labor union in the United States at the time. Widely discredited, fairly or not, the Knights of Labor never recovered.
Newspapers throughout the US denounced “anarchists,” and advocated hanging those responsible for the Haymarket Riot. A number of arrests were made, and charges were brought against eight men.
The trial of the anarchists in Chicago was a spectacle lasting for much of the summer, from late June to late August of 1886. Despite a glaring lack of evidence linking the anarchists to the bombing, all eight were convicted and sentenced to death by the illustrious Governor Richard Oglesby.
For the first meeting of the foundation of the second international the American Federation of Labor would choose May 1 to commemorate a general strike in the United States, which had begun on 1 May 1886 and culminated in the Haymarket affair four days later.
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This is probably stupid but I wanted to post it: I was rewatching Matrix revolutions last night and was awestruck by an essentially minor detail. It’s in the scene where the robots are attacking Zion. 2 characters are in a duo running through tunnels doing hit and run attacks with rocket launchers against the machines. And it just struck me as so interesting because I have watched that EXACT same situation with resistance fighters in Gaza. Dudes doing hit and run tactics from tunnels firing rockets at tanks. I know Lana and Lily likely drew inspiration from real world examples but seeing al-Qassam videos that look almost identical is so fascinating.
Also, the matrix trilogy was significantly better than I remember them being and I don’t really get why they were hated so much at the time. I was still a kid when they all came out but distinctly remember the jokes of “the matrix 2 and 3 never happened”
i think part of it is that matrix 2 and 3 should just have been mashed into 1 movie, on their own they’re kind of awkward. today we can just watch them immediately in succession and not notice that much
Mostly this. I was also put out because The Matrix was a very complete movie and didn’t really need or have room for sequels, so it felt unnecessary and a lot like a retcon. How do you challenge Neo, whose control over the simulation is so complete he can just pick bullets out of the air and dismantle agents by taking apart their code, not pretending to fight them? The first movie ended with him apparently gaining total mastery over the system, the second has him back to punching agents, flying diegetically, being a pawn of the machines, and being hurt by the simulation.
At the end of The Matrix Smith isn’t just defeated, he’s rendered completely irrelevant. Neo defeats him in the subway. Neo’s awareness and control of the system allows him to defeat Smith despite Smith’s rules-enforced physical mastery. Neo asserts his own identity, denying and defeating the system of control in which he is trapped. He “kills” smith both physically and spiritually.
The fight in the hallways isn’t really a fight. Neo “dies” but realizes, truly, that the simulation is just a simulation, one he can now observe and control. During the last fight with Smith he’s not fighting Smith. He doesn’t need to anymore. He’s observing how the “Smith” computer program behaves, and how he can interact with that program now that he really understands it. When he destroys Smith it’s not like shooting an agent. He’s not destroying the agent’s avatar in the simulation. He destroys Smith, the real Smith, the self aware Smith program. And he does it effortlessly, as easily as you’d delete a document. There’s nothing Smith can do to defend himself. He doesn’t even understand what’s happening as he dies.
Neo knows that the agents are limited by their nature as constructs within a simulation when he is told that by his comrades. He believes it during the fight in the subway. In the hallway he understands it, what it means, what his relationship with the simulation and with the Machines is. They might be able to kill him in the physical world, but within the digital simulation they no longer have any control over him, nor can they prevent him from controlling their simulation.
So narratively Matrix Reloaded and Ressurections are ret-cons to establish a status quo where Neo hasn’t won yet. Neo is no longer a programmer observing the operation of the system, he’s back inside it again and has to follow rules. Agents can fight him again on their terms, the Smiths can beat him up, Angel can beat him at Kung Fu. The stopping bullets thing isn’t a visual metaphor for his ability to see the system from outside and change the rules to suit his whims, now it’s a magical trick and programs can hurt him with a blade of all things.
From a storytelling perspective it’s all mostly necessary. If you want to have people jumping around and doing kung fu and stuff Neo in Reloaded can’t be Neo from the end of The Matrix. Neo from The Matrix would have total control over the simulation and make it suit his needs. He wouldn’t fight the agents, he’d find Agents.exe and turn it off without interacting with them in the context of the simulation at all. That Neo has no reason to do kung fu or gun fights. So we get a Neo whose mastery was just a trick, a set of super-powers within the diegetic world of the simulation.
So that part was jarring. Our guy went from absolute, uncontested victory to being a really good kung fu guy fighting other kung fu guys without any really satisfying diegetic explanation for why that should be the case.
And then on top of that, you took an extremely tight and stylish movie that was part of The 90s (note capital letters) and did a follow up in the very definitively Not The 90s post-9/11 21st century. The massive cultural shift that happened in those 3-4 years, teh change in filming techniques used, and the narrative and character work needed to turn a tightly plotted two hour action movie in to a 7 hour long epic intended to compete with LotR changed the feel of the story in a lot of important ways that felt… off. at the time. I have no idea how many times I’ve seen The Matrix, and I can still quote half the movie (I’m too old to do the dodge but I used to be really good at it). I’ve seen re-loaded a couple of times and remember some of the set pieces reasonably well. I think I’ve only seen revolutions once, I can remember almost nothing about it, and I don’t really feel any need to see it again. The Matrix is complete in itself, the sequels were okay, but not needed and for me at least didn’t add anything important to the story.
Shit, now that I think about it, in The 90s we were all gonna fight The Man, technology was cool, the internet was cool, cool shit was happening all the time. In 2001 The Man won. Decisively, definitively, absolutely. If you were against The Man you were one of the terrorists and you hated freedom. And then the man went on a fucking rampage. That was the real “end of history”, not 1991. From 1991 to 1999 no one had any idea what the fuck we were doing, the future was enormous, anything was possible. Then 2001 happened, USAPATRIOT happened, The “Coalition of the willing” happened, the GWOT happened, and history came slamming closed on us. Just took a bit to realize. That line from Stalin about what would happen if the USSR failed, the most awful reaction. The GWOT was carte-blanche for every regime in the world to side line, imprison, kill, or otherwise neutralize all of it’s dissidents. I wonder if anyone has tallied up all the damage, figured out how many people we, the Left, hope, really lost in those years. The cool terrorist heroes, the hacker ethos, the counter culture, all that shit died in Seattle in 99 and in DC in 2001.
Kind of funny, now. They’re slitting their own throats. Their precious globalization has left their economies so lean they’ve tripped in to starvation, ketosis, the muscles and sinews that keep things moving devouring themselves just to stay alive. They laughed and crowed about Soviet shortages, how it proved the folly of a controlled economy, then immediately went about carving all of the fat off their own bones leaving nothing but a skeleton that nearly collapses every time it hits a shock. If we’d won in Seattle, if the workers of the world had defeated globalization and just-in-time economies, if we’d stopped the war in Iraq, it might have helped them more than it would have us. The people, the humans working for the system, got stupefying amounts of wealth and blood, but the system itself is brittle and fragile now. The guardians of empire are now encumbered by their own senility, their inability to recognize and control their own ideologies, the craven emptiness of their beliefs. idk if the system was ever under control, but it sure as hell isn’t now.