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In reply to the discussion: I'm surprised how many DU'ers think aknowledging white male privilege is somehow bigoted [View all]jtuck004
(15,882 posts)This is Frank Little, a white guy, who had the privilege of being lynched, after being dragged from his boarding house, by 6 hooded cowards, with a previously broken leg, dragged with a rope behind a car to his hanging, having his genitals nearly severed with a sharp instrument, and hung with a rope. But it was too short, and they thought they saw some movement, so they yanked him down and strung him up again with a longer rope.
This was because the people in his union wanted 8 hour days, 40 hour weeks, an end to child labor, and thought the workers should own and run the business, as opposed the the thieving bastards who consider the biggest part of our labor surplus, and thus available for them to take.
Frank was in a union called the International Workers of the World, a union stated that "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common". He would tell you he wasn't any more special than the thousands of other men, women, children, babies that were hurt or killed, I suspect, but a victim of those doing the bidding of the wealthy.
That union, unlike the AFL and others, welcomed working people regardless of skin color, sex, creed, religion, political affiliation - none of that mattered. When they came into a meeting where black and white people were separated by state law, they told them to break it and sit together.
They knew that unrestrained capitalism was a greater enemy to all of them than any of their differences, and as long as they fought those smaller battles their opponents would continue to win the big ones. Unlike the special interest groups of today, they fought to get more for people who had less, and often lost everything in the process.
They refused to give in and the government and business mounted a campaign to destroy them, so business could ally with the unions who would treat their workers more like the capitalist wanted them to. (NLRB estimated yearly cost of employing finks, spies, local and federal government oppression at $80,000,000/yr, or about a $1 billion/yr today).
Talk about equality. Police would beat and shoot women and children just as eagerly. When women were imprisoned in the Spokane jails there is testimony that the police began to solicit clients and prostitute the inmates, while turning up the steam and nearly cooking the men in their cells. There's equality for you
Sure hope he, and all the others who were clubbed, imprisoned, shot, lynched, tied to trees and beaten before having hot tar poured into their wounds didn't suffer all that just so we could sit around and carp at each other while Mr. Charlie is making off with the rent money.
Because if we don't forget, the workers today might just figure out that much of this is by design, (think of how much of this is about property and assets, or the lack of it, a problem removed when we own industry). that it is exacerbated by our opponents as a strategy, and that if we join together to own the things that the wealthy class has now, those things they use to control and manipulate us, the things WE can run just as well as they can, then just maybe the practices in the OP will have much less to feed off of.
Just thinkin...