World Wide and not just Nation wide revolt against the new POTUS

"WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM CANNOT REST..."    ELLA BAKER

 

January 21st was a day of hope -- real hope!  Over 3 - 4 million people world wide demonstrated and marched against the presidency of a man who basically disrespects and wants to deport and or jail anyone who is a white anglo saxon protestant and rich.

Blogger Patrick James Walsh had this to say about January 21st:

Nothing like this has ever happened before in American history: one day after the swearing in of a new president, a massive nation wide revolt and rejection.
No American president has ever inspired such a response, but then no American president has so repulsed and frightened and insulted the American people as deeply as does Trump.  .....Mass Revolt Against Trump in New York and Across America

GUARDIAN today said - We Made History.  Apparently these were some of the largest demonstrations ever in our history.  I like this statistical enumeration of our victories:

Whoops!  Can't find an actual graph or chart. So I'll make one up.

WASHINGTON D.C.                    500,000

LOS ANGELES                            750,000

NEW YORK CITY                       250,000

CHICAGO                                    250,000   [ALL MY FRIENDS SAY THIS MEANS WAY MORE]

DENVER                                      150,000

SEATTLE                                     130,000

BOSTON                                      150,000

LONDON                                     100,000  

PORTLAND                                 100,000

TORONTO, CANADA                  60,000

AUSTIN                                         40,000

ST. LOUIS                                     10,000 +

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA               10,000

PALM BEACH                               7,000

SAN FRANCISCO                     150,000

OAKLAND                                 100,000


An article from US Uncut has "official estimates"  = http://usuncut.com/news/official-womens-march-attendance/    
AND
Here's a google doc of estimates: high and low -- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xa0iLqYKz8x9Yc_rfhtmSOJQ2EGgeUVjvV4A8LsIaxY/htmlview?sle=true#gid=0
It shows Los Angeles low estimate:  200,000 and high:  750,000.  That is kinda crazy -- more accurate I think would be between 500,000 and 750,000.

Worries are that this won't continue. That the DNC types like Debbie Wasserman Schultz will try to co-opt any real chance we have by making it a bourgeois white thing.   That the unity only loosely shown in DC won't grow - the speakers were very diverse there.  Was the crowd?   I didn't see enough diversity in Los Angeles - a real worry for me.  More Asians and Latinos and few African Americans is not a good result.  We should be there for these very people -- although I was told by one friend that this march "didn't speak for me" and another that it was pro-choice (of course it was!).  These are issues that have to change if we are to win.

Plus today I had to unfriend some decidedly pro-Trump Facebook acquaintances because they refuse to see anything wrong with Trump at all.  One person said that Soros funded 50 women's groups involved in the demonstration. Really?   The absurdity of another's comment -- Trump has never smoked nor drunk alcohol in his life -- just made me cringe.  I hope I am never that fanatic about another human being (as I believe I was in my teens and 20s).  But to see Trump as flawless is truly frightening.

Guardian on the Women's March - http://portside.org/2017-01-23/womens-marches-may-have-been-largest-demonstration-us-history  

Over 100 marches worldwide were also included.

Newsweek surprisingly has a nice piece on the marches:  http://www.newsweek.com/womens-march-washington-donald-trump-national-mall-545608  

A highlight for me of the march on Washington was the inclusion of Angela Davis - [this is my old poster from back when - ruined by mold in my garage, idiot that I often am]

Full Transcript of Angela Davis' speech January 21st - http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a42337/angela-davis-womens-march-speech-full-transcript/

Reproduced here:  

"At a challenging moment in our history, let us remind ourselves that we the hundreds of thousands, the millions of women, trans-people, men and youth who are here at the Women's March, we represent the powerful forces of change that are determined to prevent the dying cultures of racism, hetero-patriarchy from rising again.

"We recognize that we are collective agents of history and that history cannot be deleted like web pages. We know that we gather this afternoon on indigenous land and we follow the lead of the first peoples who despite massive genocidal violence have never relinquished the struggle for land, water, culture, their people. We especially salute today the Standing Rock Sioux.

"The freedom struggles of black people that have shaped the very nature of this country's history cannot be deleted with the sweep of a hand. We cannot be made to forget that black lives do matter. This is a country anchored in slavery and colonialism, which means for better or for worse the very history of the United States is a history of immigration and enslavement. Spreading xenophobia, hurling accusations of murder and rape and building walls will not erase history. "No human being is illegal.

"The struggle to save the planet, to stop climate change, to guarantee the accessibility of water from the lands of the Standing Rock Sioux, to Flint, Michigan, to the West Bank and Gaza. The struggle to save our flora and fauna, to save the air—this is ground zero of the struggle for social justice.

"This is a women's march and this women's march represents the promise of feminism as against the pernicious powers of state violence. And inclusive and intersectional feminism that calls upon all of us to join the resistance to racism, to Islamophobia, to anti-Semitism, to misogyny, to capitalist exploitation.

"Yes, we salute the fight for 15. We dedicate ourselves to collective resistance. Resistance to the billionaire mortgage profiteers and gentrifiers. Resistance to the health care privateers. Resistance to the attacks on Muslims and on immigrants. Resistance to attacks on disabled people. Resistance to state violence perpetrated by the police and through the prison industrial complex. Resistance to institutional and intimate gender violence, especially against trans women of color.

"Women's rights are human rights all over the planet and that is why we say freedom and justice for Palestine. We celebrate the impending release of Chelsea Manning. And Oscar López Rivera. But we also say free Leonard Peltier. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. Free Assata Shakur. "Over the next months and years we will be called upon to intensify our demands for social justice to become more militant in our defense of vulnerable populations. Those who still defend the supremacy of white male hetero-patriarchy had better watch out.

"The next 1,459 days of the Trump administration will be 1,459 days of resistance: Resistance on the ground, resistance in the classrooms, resistance on the job, resistance in our art and in our music.

"This is just the beginning and in the words of the inimitable Ella Baker, 'We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.' Thank you."

AND DON'T FORGET THE REBEL GIRL - ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN - organizer for the IWW - Industrial Workers of the World, co-founder of ACLU, and first female secretary for the Communist Party USA.  [The ACLU eventually ousted her for her "communism".]    

"The life and activism of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn merits wide recognition, especially in the era of Trump.

"Her political career shows that demonstrations are most effective when they have a tangible goal, and that organizers must be flexible in adapting tactics to the requirements and constraints of a situation. It shows that all those who take part in mass movements must be ready to face the repressive response of the state, whether it comes through legislation, intimidation, or direct violence.

"If Flynn were alive today, she would surely be in the forefront of the struggle against the right-wing populism of the Trump administration. She would be resisting anti–free speech laws coming down the pipeline, and working to organize the unorganized.

"For her, campaigns for democratic rights were bound up in the struggle for socialism, cross-racial solidarity was the foundation of any viable class politics, and the fight for liberation, while never over, always found its fullest expression in the streets."

We must never give up!

MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH - ELIZABETH GURLEY FLYNN AND THE I.W.W.

 

Known as the Rebel Girl      

   As a young woman growing up in the 50's and 60's did I have a role model for my life?  Did I see myself a hero of the day as so many of my parents' friends seemed to me? labor leaders and peace workers, civil rights leaders, social workers, and more?  At first I wanted to be a social worker as I had no idea what their true role was in a capitalist society.  And then I read about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the brave I.W.W. leader of many strikes and struggles for the rights of working people.

Taken in its entirety from The Socialist Worker biography:    

"FOR PEACE and socialism is in the hearts, in the minds, on the lips of millions around the world...The 'sun of tomorrow' shines upon us. The future is ours."

So said one of the giants of American radicalism, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, in a May Day speech in 1941. Flynn dedicated her life to the struggles of the working class through its highest and lowest points. She breathed class struggle and spoke of revolution for nearly 60 years, and her legacy is worthy of the highest admiration.

Born to poor Irish immigrants in 1890 in New Hampshire, she could claim proudly, "There had been an uprising in each generation in Ireland [against British rule], and forefathers of mine were reputed to be in every one of them."

Her father, Thomas Flynn, educated her and her siblings in the meaning of her Irish heritage and the politics of liberation. "When one understood British imperialism, it was an open window to all imperialism," wrote Flynn. "As children, we came to hate unjust wars, which took the land and rights away from other peoples."

Now living in the South Bronx, her father drifted to socialist politics and brought young Elizabeth with him. Recounting what her father taught her, Elizabeth said, "Scientific socialism made clear that it was not a poor man's fault if he is out of work...and you were not a 'failure' because you did not climb to riches on the backs of your fellow man."

Thomas Flynn--who ran for the New York State Assembly on the Socialist ticket in 1918--later became overbearing and eventually jealous of his daughter's popularity in the labor movement. But looking back, Elizabeth still felt that "[o]ur father's methods were not entirely correct, but his purpose was clear, not to allow his children to be 'educated' against the interests of the working class."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

FLYNN WOULD begin to develop politically on her own, devouring socialist novels like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and William Morris' News From Nowhere, along with the works of Peter Kropotkin and August Bebel. It was the latter's book Woman Under Socialism that she used as a basis for her first public speech and lecture on "What Socialism Will Do For Women," which she gave at age 15.    [People's World says: At 16, she gave her first speech, "What Socialism Will Do for Women." For her political activities, Flynn was expelled from high school."]

A lifelong advocate for birth control access and a fighter for women's rights, she said looking back on those times, writing in her autobiography Rebel Girl:

     "Fathers and husbands collected women's wages, sometimes right at the company door. Women did not have a legal right to their own earnings...Equal opportunity, equal pay and the right to be organized were the crying needs of women wage-earner then and unfortunately still now."
This teenage agitator become a hit among working men and women, and a target for sexist ire from the snobbish New York Times, which commented after her first of many arrests in 1906, "Miss Flynn, who will graduate school in two years and whose shoe tops...show below her skirts [i.e., she dressed immodestly], tells us what to think, which is just what she thinks."

A Broadway producer wanted to offer her a career as an actress due to her clear oratory talents, which she refused, saying, "I don't want to be an actress! I want to speak my own words."

Flynn began to speak across the country on behalf of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, often referred to as the "Wobblies"). She joined the IWW's Mixed Local No. 179 in 1906, a year after the IWW's founding.

During her long train trips to labor struggles and speaking engagements, she said she "fell in love with [this] country, its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains...I felt then, as I do now, it's a rich and fertile land, capable of satisfying all the needs of its people. It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class."

Now, as a "professional revolutionist" with the IWW, she became a close collaborator with socialist Eugene Debs and IWW leaders Vincent St. John, Mother Jones and Joe Hill, the rebel songwriter. Flynn became a close friend of legendary Irish socialist James Connolly, who would be executed by the British in 1916 for his part in leading the Dublin Easter Rising against imperial rule, and helped him organize the Irish Socialist Federation.

One of her most important political relationships was with IWW leader and organizer William "Big Bill" Haywood. Flynn recalled some years later how Bill said in a speech, "'I'm a two-gun man from the West, you know.' And while the audience waited breathlessly, he pulled his union card from one pocket and his Socialist card from the other."

Though the two would have a major political falling out some years later over the direction of the IWW, Flynn and Haywood worked closely together in a number of the IWW's most historic struggles.

They worked together organizing agricultural workers in the West and lumber workers in the Pacific Northwest, and at countless freedom of speech fights all over the country. They were part of the 1913 silk strike in Paterson, N.J.; massive textile strikes in Lowell and New Bedford, Mass., and the great "Bread and Roses" strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Mass.

Flynn was arrested for one trumped-up charge or another at just about all of these occasions. Her son Fred boasted many years later that he had been arrested twice, once in Missoula and a second time in Spokane--before he was even born.

During the Lawrence "Bread and Roses" strike, Flynn and Haywood worked hard to educate the mostly immigrant textile workers of, as Flynn put it:


      "their power, as workers, as the producers of all wealth, as the creators of profit. We talked of "solidarity," a beautiful word in all languages. We said firmly, "You work together for the boss. You can stand together to fight for yourselves!" We ridiculed the police and militia. "Can they weave cloth with soldiers' bayonets or policemen's club?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THIS WAS the Wobblies' great strength--the ability to relate and speak to people on their own terms, to point out to workers what they already knew in their guts, that the whole system is stacked against them and the only chance they've got is to band together, into "One Big Union."

These were the high points of the early IWW, but they didn't last. While the key to the IWW's success was organizing among the unskilled workers who the American Federation of Labor refused to organize, some of their own policies diminished their ability to hold the group together.

For instance, the IWW refused to sign contracts over wages, benefits and working conditions because this, IWW leaders believed, represented a compromise with the bosses. Without contracts, the IWW failed to consolidate many of the gains it made during the brave workers' struggles it led. In many cases, when IWW organizers left town, the local organizations fell apart.

The IWW also argued that the key to transforming society was organizing the majority of workers into "One Big Union," which would be the framework for a new socialist society. The final blow to capitalism would come through a mass general strike that would paralyze the economy and force the bosses to give industry over to the working class. As a result, the IWW didn't participate in politics--leaving this important arena of struggle to the Socialist Party, which was dominated by a conservative wing.

Reflecting many years later, Flynn said that "possibly a permanent industrial union movement could have been built a quarter century earlier than the CIO. But our incurable 'infantile leftism' blinded us." By the beginning of the First World War, the IWW had been weakened by splits, factionalism and an unwillingness to tackle explicitly political issues.

And this was just before its greatest challenge. With the entry of the U.S. into the First World War, a wave of government-backed mob violence spread across the country. Pacifists, certain Christian sects, German immigrants, socialists and especially Wobblies were attacked, brutalized, tarred and feathered, and sometimes lynched.

During the Red Scare, socialists and communists, anarchists, Wobblies, unionists and other radicals were attacked, their halls ransacked and their members arrested. Many were rounded up in the Palmer Raids, named after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and deported under the auspices of the Espionage and Sedition Acts.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn took it upon herself at this time to struggle for the freedom all of these "class war prisoners." She said, "We planned to work for the release of all [labor] and political prisoners...the imprisoned comrades, of whatever persuasions, were a bond of unity."
She became a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a principal activist within the International Labor Defense (ILD), which formed in 1925.

"One of our first undertakings was to publicize the facts of each case," explained Flynn. "We organized outside correspondents to write to the prisoners. Through these channels, we soon became very familiar with the conditions inside the gray, forbidding walls of federal penitentiaries."

Flynn helped win the release of those who participated in the Green Corn Rebellion, a revolt of poor Oklahoma farmers against the draft, fought for the freedom of many imprisoned Wobblies and antiwar activists, and was heavily involved in the campaign to save Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti from execution.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

HER POLITICAL activities in the 1920s were cut short by illness, and she spent the better part of a decade ill and inactive. When she finally re-entered her lifelong work as a revolutionist, it was to join the Communist Party (CP)--an organization she had already moved close to through her work with the ILD.

Flynn joined the Communist Party in 1936, was elected to the national committee two years later and became national chairperson in 1961. [She was the first woman to hold the post, and she retained it until her death. A suit carried to the Supreme Court (Aptheker v. Secretary of State), challenging the constitutionality of a provision of the 1950 Subversive Activities Control Act that denied the issuance of passports to communists, was won in 1964, and she promptly secured a passport in order to visit the Soviet Union. When she died that year, she was given a state funeral in Red Square.]

By this point, the U.S. Communist Party, like all those around the world, had become a creature of the new ruling bureaucracy in Russia, led by Joseph Stalin, and so it followed the dictates from Russia, even when this meant opposing struggle.

Flynn followed the CP line through its many appalling twists and turns, including the Stalin-Hitler Pact, and then support for the Second World War, revelations by Khrushchev of the extent of Stalin's murderous crimes, and the Russian suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

But this period in her life shouldn't overshadow Flynn's record of militancy and courage in the cause of the labor movement, for which she faced police violence and was thrown in jail countless times for her beliefs and even served two years behind bars in the late 1950s as a victim of McCarthyism.

In a world of "great men" she was a proud, working-class, Irish woman who stood with her shoulders square and spoke with an impassioned voice that was eloquent, yet relatable; inspiring, but not condescending; and militant to the core." 

    "When Elizabeth Gurley Flynn went to see the great IWW songwriter Joe Hill in Salt Lake City while he was awaiting execution for a crime he didn't commit, Joe dedicated a song to Flynn called "The Rebel Girl":


"Yes, her hands may be harden'd from labor
And her dress may not be very fine;
But a heart in her bosom is beating
That is true to her class and her kind.
And the grafters in terror are trembling
When her spite and defiance she'll hurl.
For the only and thoroughbred lady
Is the Rebel Girl."

"And this is exactly how Elizabeth Gurley Flynn deserves to be remembered."  Flynn died September 5, 1964 in Moscow, Russia.

SABOTAGE by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn - http://www.iww.org/history/library/Flynn/Sabotage 
About Education Biography - http://womenshistory.about.com/od/elizabethgurleyflynn/a/rebel_girl.htm 
Statement at the Smith Act Trial - http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/elizabethgurleyflynn.htm 
Socialist Worker Party history - http://socialistworker.org/2012/08/07/the-story-of-the-rebel-girl 
Britannica Bio - http://www.britannica.com/biography/Elizabeth-Gurley-Flynn 
The People's World - http://www.peoplesworld.org/women-s-history-elizabeth-gurley-flynn-the-rebel-girl/ 
Biography, Your Dictionary - http://biography.yourdictionary.com/elizabeth-gurley-flynn 

Additional Reading Sources:

Flynn published two books about her life: 

The Rebel Girl, An Autobiography: My First Life (1906-1926; revised edition, 1973) and 

The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner (1955). 

A summary of Flynn's IWW and labor defense activities can be found in Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, "Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Early Years," in Radical America (January-February 1975). 

The following books provide discussions of Flynn in the context of women activists and labor radicals: 

Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (1969); Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917 (1980); and June Sochen, Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists, 1900-1970 (1973).

Additional Biography Sources

Camp, Helen C., Iron in her soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left, Pullman, Wash.: WSU Press, 1995.

Read more at http://biography.yourdictionary.com/elizabeth-gurley-flynn#MhRZJJKu5jWhWySp.99