Lucy Parsons
More dangerous than a thousand rioters
Labour agitator and IWW founder.
Progressive SyndicalistOne of 729 ideologies · enter the Syndicalist hall →- Role
- Organiser
- Era
- 1851–1942
- Region
- United States
- Social band
- Progressive
- Placement
- −80 · −26 · +70
§ Where Lucy Parsons stands
3 axesParsons wanted the wealth of society taken from employers and held in common by those who produced it, first as an anarchist-communist and then as a syndicalist. At the IWW's founding convention in 1905 she urged workers not to walk out and starve but to stay in their workplaces and take possession of the means of production, anticipating the sit-down strikes of the 1930s.
Parsons rejected the ballot box and the state as instruments of the propertied, advocating direct action, strikes and, in her early writings, armed resistance. Her lean stops short of the pole because from 1927 she worked closely with the Communist-led International Labor Defense, campaigning for prisoners such as the Scottsboro defendants alongside a party that sought state power.
Parsons was radical on class, race and sex at once. A woman of colour married to a white man in Reconstruction Texas, she defied the era's racial order in her own life, and at the 1905 IWW convention she spoke for the organisation of women workers, treating the oppression of women and of Black Americans as products of class exploitation.
How close are you to Lucy Parsons?
Three statements, one per axis. Answer them and we’ll drop you on the compass next to them.
§ The story
HistoricalLucy Parsons (c. 1851–1942) was an American anarchist, labour organiser and writer. Probably born into slavery in Virginia and raised in Texas, she married Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier turned Radical Republican, around 1872, and the couple moved to Chicago in 1873 to escape hostility in Texas. There she wrote for the anarchist paper The Alarm, which Albert edited, and organised working women and the unemployed as Chicago became a centre of the American labour movement.
After the 1886 Haymarket bombing, Albert Parsons was among eight anarchists convicted in a trial widely condemned as unjust, and he was hanged in 1887. Lucy spent the rest of her life defending the Haymarket martyrs, editing radical papers and speaking across the country, and in 1905 she helped found the Industrial Workers of the World. Her 1884 article To Tramps, urging the hungry to turn explosives on the rich, remains her most controversial text. In later life she worked with the Communist-led International Labor Defense, and she died in a house fire in Chicago in 1942.
Notable for
- 01Co-founded the IWW
- 02Decades of labour agitation
- 03Champion of the dispossessed
Key works & moments
- 1884Her article To Tramps in The Alarm urges the hungry to learn the use of explosives.
- 1886The Haymarket bombing in Chicago leads to the trial of Albert Parsons and seven other anarchists.
- 1887Albert Parsons is hanged; Lucy campaigns for the Haymarket defendants for the rest of her life.
- 1889Publishes Life of Albert R. Parsons, a memorial and history of the labour movement.
- 1905Co-founds the IWW, calling for strikes that occupy the means of production.
- 1942Dies in a fire at her Chicago home, aged about 90.
In their own words
“My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production.”
§ Minds closest to Lucy Parsons
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§ Also in the Syndicalist hall
Enter the hall →§ Common questions
4 answersWhat was Lucy Parsons's political ideology?
Lucy Parsons was an anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist: on the 99ideologies three-axis compass, a Progressive Syndicalist. Economically she sat far to the left (−80), seeking workers' collective control of production through militant unions. On governance she leaned libertarian (−26), preferring direct action to elections, though she later worked with Communists. Socially she was strongly progressive (+70), defying the racial order of her time and insisting that women workers be organised as equals.
Was Lucy Parsons left-wing or right-wing?
Left-wing, on the radical far left. Parsons spent more than six decades attacking capitalism, first as an anarchist-communist in the Chicago movement of the 1880s and then as a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World. She distrusted electoral politics and preached direct action, which put her well to the left of the socialists of her day, and in old age she aligned herself with the Communist-led defence campaigns of the 1930s.
Was Lucy Parsons an anarchist or a communist?
Mainly an anarchist. Parsons came to prominence in the anarchist movement of 1880s Chicago, edited anarchist papers and joined the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World at its founding in 1905. From 1927 she worked closely with the Communist Party's International Labor Defense, campaigning for political prisoners, and some accounts say she joined the party in 1939, though historians dispute it. Her lifelong core was the belief that workers should take direct control of production without relying on the state.
Which minds are closest to Lucy Parsons?
On the 99ideologies three-axis compass, the minds closest to Lucy Parsons are Clara Zetkin (95% alike), Rosa Luxemburg (95% alike) and Karl Liebknecht (94% alike). The furthest is Adam Sutler (0% alike).