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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

We Never Forget

"I'd rather starve striking than starve working."


2013 is the 100the anniversary of the Patterson Silk Strike. Very little is ever taught in schools about the history of the labor movement. At best, we are taught that some kindly old men in Congress decided one day, out of the goodness of their hearts, to pass laws granting rights and protections to unions and workers. The curriculum overlooks the history of class warfare and struggle.

The Industrial Workers of the World activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (The original Rebel Girl) declared at a strike meeting:
 “The silk bosses are robbers. The cars they are driving, the diamonds their wives are wearing, the rich food their families are eating, their winter vacations in Florida's sunshine-all come from the labors of Angelica and twenty-five thousand other silk workers. And when you win the raises you are fighting for," she said, "you'll get back only a little of what you produced. But these raises are just a beginning. The time is coming when you will run these plants for yourselves."

A striker recalls Gurley Flynn called a meeting just for the women one day. She started with that lovely way of hers. She looked at us and said, "Would you like to have nice clothes?" We replied, "Oh, yes." "Would you like to have nice shoes?" "Oh,yes." we shouted. "Well, you can't have them. Your bosses' daughters have those things!" We got mad. We knew it was true. We had shoes with holes, and they had lovely things. Then she said, "Would you like to have soft hands like your bosses' daughters?" and we got mad all over again.”

On the picket lines, the strikers were subject to daily mass arrest. Many were sentenced to ten or twenty days, some to six months at hard labor. The Paterson Press openly called for violence against the IWW organizers, calling for the formation of a vigilance committee to drive them out of town.
On Thursday, April 17, 1913, Modestino Valentino was murdered by private detectives, hired gunmen imported from New York by the mill owners. This man's only crime against the mill owners was that he was standing on his own front porch watching the strikers yell at the scab-herders. He was not a striker, nor was he a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. The insults so bothered the gunmen that they felt compelled to open fire on unarmed workers.

In total five workers in all lost their lives in the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. In spite of the courage shown by the strikers and their leaders, the silk strikers were defeated. Some small concessions were made by a few of the mill owners, but for the most part, strikers went back to work defeated. Some had been replaced by scabs and were never re-hired. It was a financial disaster also, which only further discouraged the strikers. But in the end the strike was lost because the strikers were starving.

Gurley Flynn later spoke of the suffering that the strikers endured before they were driven back to work by hunger:
“I saw men go out in Paterson without shoes, in the middle of winter and with bags on their feet, I went into a family to have a picture taken of a mother with eight children who didn't have a crust of bread, didn't have a bowl of milk for the baby in the house,-but the father was out on the picket line. Others were just as bad off. Thousands of them that we never heard of at all. This was the difficulty that the workers had to contend with in Paterson: hunger; hunger gnawing a their vitals; hunger tearing them down; and still they had the courage to fight it out for six months.”

Let us honor the courage and sacrifice of the Paterson strikers by continuing the struggle. We need to keep in mind a few fundamental things. The business interests aren’t in business to give us jobs. They’re not there to make money for us. They are there to make money for themselves. We are not people to them. We are equipment, a human resource. We are an expense—and the over-riding interest of any business is to cut the expenses. We are no different to them than a computer terminal or a lump of raw material. We are just something else that they have to pay for if they want to make money. Just another thing that they buy as cheaply as they can, use until it wears out or breaks down, then throw away and buy a new one. And when they buy a new one, they don’t care what color it is or what language it speaks or what country it comes from. All they care is “Can it make me money better than that one over there?” The business interests have never GIVEN us a goddamn thing. Everything we have, we have because we organized for it, we fought for it, and very many times, we died for it. And we will never forget that.

As the IWW says “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. Between these two classes, a struggle must go on, until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, and abolish the wage system.”

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was later to be carried away by the false optimism of the Russian Revolution and joined the American Communist Party. She ended up on trial for her political beliefs and in her court statement she said:
"My travels as a Communist speaker have taken me all over the country. I saw the fruits of a lawless, aggressive, brutal and ruthless capitalism which garnered profits for a few at the expense of the many.
Our country is a rich and beautiful country, fully capable of producing plenty for all, educating its youth and caring for its aged. We believe it could do this under Socialism. I saw great forests cut down and the denuded land left with blackened stumps; miles of top soil blown and washed away, and fertile fields became like a desert.
I have seen textile workers who wove beautiful woolen fabrics shivering for lack of warm clothing, and coal miners living in cold shacks in company towns, and steel towns that were armed camps. I saw men black-listed, driven from town to town, forced to change their names because they had dared to try to organize a union.
We will prove to you that it is not the Communists who have advocated or practiced force and violence but that it is the employing class which has done both throughout the history of my life in the American labor movement, like General Sherman Bell who said in Colorado during a miner’s strike 'To Hell with habeas corpus; we’ll give them post-mortems.'
We will prove to you that it is not the working people nor we who flaunt the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but that is has always been done by the employing class. We will prove that we are fighting here for our constitutional and democratic rights, not to advocate force and violence, but to expose and stop its use against the people.”









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