Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Archive
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Archive
A founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, she was involved in the campaign against the conviction in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. In 1936 Flynn joined the Communist Party and wrote a bi-weekly column for women’s rights for the Daily Worker, and chaired the women’s commission. In two years she was elected to the CP national committee. In 1942 Flynn ran for Congress in New York and received 50,000 votes.
Sabotage – by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn | Industrial Workers of the World
Sabotage – by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn | Industrial Workers of the World
I am not going to attempt to justify sabotage on any moral ground. If the workers consider that sabotage is necessary, that in itself makes sabotage moral. Its necessity is its excuse for existence. And for us to discuss the morality of sabotage would be as absurd as to discuss the morality of the strike or the morality of the class struggle itself. In order to understand sabotage or to accept it at all it is necessary to accept the concept of class struggle. If you believe that between the workers on the one side and their employers on the other there is peace, there is harmony such as exists between brothers, and that consequently whatever strikes and lockouts occur are simply family squabbles; if you believe that a point can be reached whereby the employer can get enough and the worker can get enough, a point of amicable adjustment of industrial warfare and economic distribution, then there is no justification and no explanation of sabotage intelligible to you.
Women’s history: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Rebel Girl
The story of the Rebel Girl
“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.”
Flynn Biography
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was one of the most influential labor organizers of the early 20th century, and was the first female leader of the Communist Party. She lived a colorful life full of success and failure both in her professional and personal life, and dedicated her life to helping the working class.
Education & Resources – National Women’s History Museum – NWHM
Education & Resources – National Women’s History Museum – NWHM
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964)
Women and Marxism: Marxists Internet Archive
Women and Marxism: Marxists Internet Archive
This subject section has been created to provide broad documentation both on women’s issues and Marxism, and also a space for women’s writings that are significant, but transcriptions not currently volumous or organized enough to warrant their own section.
Some of these writers are not Marxists, but are included for context or reference. The intention is to also include the cultural as well as political milieu in which revolutionary women have worked during their struggles.
As with the rest of MIA, most heavily represented are classic texts. The few references to contemporary Marxism-Feminism are meant to be a gateway to further exploration for interested readers.
Communists in Harlem
Organizing against racism during the Great Depression
Communists in Harlem
February 24, 2006
WITH THE republication of Mark Naison’s book Communists in Harlem During the Depression (University of Illinois Press, 2005), a new generation of socialists will have the opportunity to learn the lessons of Communist Party’s (CP) antiracist organizing in the 1930s. ADAM TURL explains why the CP’s successes, and mistakes, are important today.
Communists in Harlem During the Depression provides a new generation of socialists with lessons that can help build today’s struggles–and create a political alternative, so that the next historic opportunity, when it comes, will not be lost.
Notes on the 1946 General Strike
[vimeo 43192608 w=250 h=141]
When people found out that we were making work about Oakland, we were asked one question time and again: “What do you know about the general strike?” The answer was, not much. We’d never heard of it before moving to the city. For us, this video was a way to learn about the strike—it took place in 1946, and was the last of many general strikes that broke out in America in the first half of the 20th century—and relate it to our present-day experience of Oakland. The Taft-Hartley Act, which passed—overriding a presidential veto—in 1947, was a direct response to the six General Strikes that broke out in 1946. Still in effect today, Taft-Hartley puts severe limits on labor’s abilities to call strikes.
(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)