1910s
Revolution In The Air: The Historical Significance Of The Green Corn Rebellion
Originally published in http://www.oklahomarevelator.com/ republished courtesy of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The year of the Green Corn Rebellion, 1917, was a tumultuous year. The war among the imperialist European states had been raging for three years when President Woodrow Wilson ordered U.S. troops to join the fray in April 1917.
Franz Kafka and libertarian socialism
Michael Löwy explores the links between the seminal writer and the anarchist/libertarian socialist movement.
Clearly, the work of Franz Kafka cannot be reduced to a political doctrine of any kind. Kafka did not give speeches but fashioned individuals and situations. In his work, he expressed a Stimmung or sense of feelings and attitudes. The symbolic world of literature cannot be reduced to the discursive world of ideologies.
1911: Liverpool general transport strike
A short history of the strike movement that took hold of Liverpool during the summer of 1911. Culminating in a massive general strike of all transport workers, the movement displayed some of the most extraordinary scenes of class solidarity seen in Britain.
The strike movement of Liverpool occurred during the great period of industrial unrest that was to grip Britain between 1910 and the outbreak of the First World War. Beginning with a walk-out of seamen, the strike soon snowballed and went on to reach epic proportions, involving up to 70,000 people.
Left-Wing Communism in Britain 1917-21...An Infantile Disorder? - Bob Jones
A survey of the anti-parliamentarist communist movement in Britain during and after WWI, and the effects of Comintern/Bolshevik directives on the efforts at organisational unity.
Lenin's famous manual of reformism, "Left Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder(1920), which directed Communists to work within parliament and existing labour unions, was partly a response to British anti-parliamentarism.
US Green Corn rebellion, 1917
In 1917, the Working Class Union reacted to the imposition of military conscription with an ill-fated but heroic armed rebellion that stands with the agitational campaigns of working class anarchists as a revolutionary response to US entry into World War One.
It's still a matter of conjecture what convinced “Rube” Munson and the WCU there was going to be a national rebellion.
I'd like to thank the work of Oklahoma grass-roots historians and journalists for finding and publishing period newspaper accounts
From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution - Otto Ruhle
Written in 1924, this pamphlet charts the development of the Russian and German revolutions, and attempts to point forward from the failure of these two major events, analysing the role of the parties and the trade unions in their respective failures.
This online version taken from http://www.marxists.org
From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution
1 The Bourgeois Revolutions
1919: US steel strike
While defeated by overwhelming police repression against pickets and union halls, the 1919 strike is significant in the history of organized class struggle in basic manufacturing and the high point of William Z. Foster's "bore from within" approach to syndicalism.
1919 Steel Strike
October 3, 1919
The Steel Strike Still Holds Public Attention
October 10, 1919
The Steel Strike is Still On
With Few if Any Changes
The Workers' Committee: An Outline of its Principles and Structure
Pamphlet written by J.T.Murphy and published by the Sheffield Workers' Committee in 1917. It describes the structure of the workers' committees that developed during the first world war and proposes coordinating them into local and national committees in parallel with the trade unions.
“Where the men and women think lightly of the laws; . . . . where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons; . . . . where outside authority enters after the precedence of inside authority; where the citizen is always the head and ideal; where children are taught to be laws to themselves; . . . there the great city stands.” - Walt Whitman.
Calgary 1919: The Birth of the OBU and the General Strike - Eugene Plawiuk
Eugene Plawiuk's history of the Calgary general strike of 1919, which started off as a sympathy strike for the Winnipeg general strike and soon escalated into their own struggle for union recognition.
The One Big Union was founded a mere two months before it was baptized by the Winnipeg General Strike. The founding Convention was held in the Calgary Labour Temple (which still stands today, though it has been converted into a Chinese Restaurant).
The Edmonton General Strike of 1919 - Eugene Plawiuk
Eugene Plawiuk's account of the Edmonton general strike of 1919 which was sparked off in solidarity with the general strike in Winnipeg,
In May of 1919 a heat wave crossed the province. Edmonton had reached temperatures of 85 degrees. Like the heat wave a mood of union militancy was in the air across Alberta, indeed across Western Canada. A strike wave would soon erupt sweeping the West like a prairie fire.
