Here is one person's account of how autoworkers used violence in the course of inning the right to have a union in the Great Flint, Michigan Sit Down Strike of 1936-7:
"GM's security forces tried to enter on Jan. 11 1937 and were repulsed by workers inside the plant using fire hoses (this is January, in Michigan, mind. It was probably well below freezing) and chucking car parts at them. The cops responded with tear gas. The wives and members of the women's auxiliary broke out windows to help clear the gas out of the plant. Then the cops showed up, tried a few more times (the union members outside the plant shouting over a PA system warned the workers where the next wave would come from and generally directed the battle) and, frustrated, the motherf*ckers fired almost point-blank into the crowd of union supporters. The union's sound truck battery was running low. Things were looking grim for our heroes.
"Then this bad-*ss broad stood up and grabbed the mic.
"Cowards! Cowards! Shooting unarmed and defenseless men! Women of Flint! This is your fight! Join the picket line and defend your jobs, your husband's job and your children's homes!"
"The battle continued. Shortly thereafter, the faint sound of singing and marching could be heard. A group of four-hundred women, red-caps shining in the dark, led by a bearer of the American flag and bearing homemade clubs were singing 'Hold the Fort'. (This was later rewritten for a union version). It was the Emergency Women's Brigade, formed of the wives, sisters and girlfriends of the striking union workers. They pushed through the police (who were for some reason reluctant to shoot women in the back), marched up to the plant and turned around to face the cops, brandishing whatever they'd had at home that could be swung. People were cheering their f*cking heads off. The cops looked around, turned tail and left.
"And that is how the strikers won 'The Battle of Bulls Run' (Bull being slang for a cop at the time, Bull's Run a famous Civil War battle). Sixteen strikers had been wounded (mostly from gunshots) and eleven police hurt by the two-inch metal door hinges thrown by the sit-downers from the roof of the plant. Thankfully, there were no deaths."
The Civil Rights Movement in the American South is known to most people as a nonviolent movement. But the fact is that black people in the South, before and during the Civil Rights Movement years, used guns in self defense against the Ku Klux Klan and racist police, and Jim Crow would never have been abolished otherwise. One can read this hidden part of our history in books such as Negroes with Guns (online here ) and This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (online here .)
As in the past, there will be times in the course of building the revolutionary movement when working class Americans will find it advantageous to use violence (with arms if they have them) in self-defense. Not only will the appropriate use of arms [2] make it possible to defend against ruling class attacks, it will also make it more evident to members of the armed forces that the revolutionary movement is determined to win and worthy of their support in a showdown with the plutocracy.
The overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. armed forces compared to ordinary people with privately owned guns is a fact, but this fact does not mean that the right to bear arms is no longer important as a defense against tyranny. Guns in the hands of ordinary people will very likely enable them to defend themselves against the ruling class in pre-revolutionary times, and to succeed in persuading members of the Armed Forces to support the revolutionary movement in revolutionary times.
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[1] According to the Justice Department , "Street gangs, outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMGs), and prison gangs are the primary distributors of illegal drugs on the streets of the United States." And according to this report , gang activity accounts for an average of 48% of violent crime in most jurisdictions, and up to 90% in some jurisdictions. As discussed here, gangs are essentially the way the illegal drug business is conducted, and because it is illegal it must rely on illegal violence to compete and enforce contracts as opposed to relying on the state's legal violence or credible threat of violence as legal businesses do. Furthermore, the reason poor people, disproportionately blacks and Hispanics, go into the illegal drug business is because for many of them the only alternative, in our society of class inequality, is to settle for a minimum wage job with no future that is disrespected by everybody; the "drug business," in contrast, offers the lure of an opportunity to rise up in the business and obtain great wealth and prestige. The root of the problem of gang violence is class inequality; the solution is to abolish class inequality, and whether the working class should be armed for this purpose is what "Guns and the Working Class" is about.
[2] Here is a video showing cops beating up a black youth. And here is a video (go to the 33:15 time point) of a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (and former editor of the Wall Street Journal) saying that Americans should fight back--violently--against the cops when they attack people this way. Here is an article --one of countless others like it--about how police thugs terrorize ordinary Americans. Here's another one.
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