The Bread and Roses Workers’ Cultural Center in west Denver is one way we continue the celebration of working class culture. We display art; we pass along our history in stories, books, music, poetry; we honor our heroes and heroines; and we prepare for a future where work will be a matter of creativity and cooperation, not the drudgery and exploitation it is now.
Our aim is to develop harmony between life and work, and our method is to identify and promote such endeavors by working people in their everyday lives all around us, all around the world.
The project exists because we need to develop a modern alternative to disintergrating forms of community and culture. Commercial relations have failed in this regard, even as they have eroded traditional structures like family, church and school. What has not been broken is the sense of shared values and comaraderie that arises from working together—again, in the healthy, creative sense, not the usual alienated “work”. And the possibilities that grow out of this are expanding. While there has been a shift away from heavy, industrial labor especially in the U.S., the organization of people into working collectives has expanded tremendously in recent years. As we grow into a global society, the impulse for productive, yet eglitarian and cooperative worker-based relations will only increase with time.
Practically, we want to be a magnet for working class art and cultural forms that embody a feeling of solidarity, and a mirror that helps working folks feel good about themselves and their work.
We are a new and small institution. So far we have:
- established and renovated a space at 2641 River Drive (above P&L Printing,2298 Clay Street just north of Mile High Stadium in Denver)
- collected a small array of books, posters, T-shirts, buttons and stickers that express our history and spirit
- developed displays of Colorado coal miners’ history, and a tribute to the groundbreaking P-9 strike of packinghouse workers in 1985, plus memorials to Joe Hill and the Bread and Roses strike.