For about eight years after college I had the good fortune of working in the great Northwest’s forests as a tree planter and cone picker. For three of those years I was part of a two hundred member worker cooperative in Eugene Oregon that was the hub of about forty worker collectives who together accomplished about one third of the country’s manual reforestation. (In the Southeast’s rolling hills trees were planted by machine. In the Northwest’s cascading wildernesses human’s pretending to be goats clamored and leapt over slash and ash strewn slopes planting with a hoe like tool on the end of an axe like handle, called a Hoedag or Hoedad.)
As the largest US based worker owner movement in that period, we were conscious of our predecessors in the forests, the IWW, the Wobblies, the I Wont Works and the I Will Wins, the International Workers of the World.
I was lucky to be part of starting a crew that attracted one of Eugene’s most impressive public figures at that time, a man who had worked with Big Bill Hayward and Emma Goldman, a man who called himself, “Stupid.” He spread his words on broadsheets and pamphlets at the public market, and by his bull-horn voice. Below is one of his broadsheets that still inspires me.

And the organization has to determine the forces necessary to get the job done.
And if it is going to get the job going with any hope of success, it must know how to organize.
And know when they are organized, and no longer a mob.
Also what can be done with each.
How to recruit, and how to mobilize.
How to place the forces available, where they can function most efficiently.
And still not overwork, or burn out, the willing member.
For the secret of any form of a successful group or organization, is to keep every member in a position, or nearby to where they can do the most difficult task, in the most efficient way, for the organizations greatest good.
And any violation of this rule, weakens the whole structure of the organization.
And keeps it from being anything but a small sectarian group, that can meet at any time in an average parlor
And its influence in the community will amount to about the same.
And it may continue its mediocre way.
Until some organization, that knows the skills and methods, comes along, that will pass them up,
Like a pay train passing a tramp.

By Stupid.