What Trump and His Fans Want to Go Back To.

The working class of the world has great hero's. Not Football Stars who are forced to go in to the community to make their billionaire owners look good. Not millionaire film stars fond of adopting, in one sense stealing, children from poor countries and communities ravaged by the market. But those of us who brave all in the struggle for justice and equality in an exploitative social system.

Most of these hero's are unknown, not in the history books. I read about Big Mary Septak in the Mother Jones biography and she always stuck in my mind. Mother Jones, an Irish immigrant lost a few of her children to yellow fever but remained a union organizer in to her nineties. There's heroes in the struggles against colonialism, for the right to organize, against racism, religious repression for rights on the job and for women's rights and much more. Despite the very successful tactic of racism that has caused untold harm to the working class in the US, US labor history is also rich in heroic struggle and there were times, despite the consequences, when workers from all backgrounds stuck together, but so many US workers know nothing about it.

Fannie Lou Hamer had incredible odds, a woman, a black woman, a worker, no formal education and so on. She stood strong, literally risking her life fighting for working class people, not just her own color and sex.  Just listen for a minute what she and others had to face to go to that Democratic Party Convention and if you have any illusions of the sheer brutality that capitalism has meant for US workers this should shatter it.  In addition to being a worker Hamer had to deal with sexual and racial oppression and we should see this woman as the heroic figures she is. And there are enemies of the working class, some of them among us and workers themselves, who want to turn the clock back. We will stand against that in her memory and the millions of working class people that have fought and died so we can have a somewhat better existence they they did. Richard Mellor