World War I
Speech in the Reichstag - Otto Rühle
Otto Rühle's speech to the Reichstag, rejecting the proposed shift to parliamentary democracy and calling for social revolution.
25th October 1918
A people's history of World War I - Howard Zinn
Historian Howard Zinn's account of US involvement in World War I, the reasons behind it, and working class resistance to it.
Mollie Steimer, 1897-1980 - Paul Avrich
The life of Mollie Steimer, a Jewish anarchist in New York who opposed the First World War, and later lived in exile in France and Mexico.
Mollie Steimer: An Anarchist Life
By Paul Avrich
Memoirs of the I.W.W. [Australia] - Bill Beattie
Recollections of struggles in the years around the First World War - by a former Australian Wobbly.
From; Labour History no. 13, (Journal of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History), Nov. 1967.
MEMOIRS OF THE I.W.W. [Australia]
Bill Beattie
The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919: The Forgotten Revolution - Alan Woods
Trotskyist Alan Woods on the Hungarian uprising of 1919. Wood's account suffers from the usual analytical errors by Trotskyists but is included for reference to these little-known events.
November 12, 1979
Glasgow and the Wobblies
The Industrial Workers of the World's influence in Glasgow is not so well known, but it had considerable influence on the shop stewards movement in the period around the First World War:
"It was perhaps a natural development that one of the strongest branches of the Advocates of Industrial Unionism should be in the Singer Sewing Machine Works at Kilbowie, Clydebank, which employed some 12,000 workers. Singers was primarily an American firm, but it had established itself in Europe, and exerted an effective monopoly in the manufacture of sewing machines.
War is the health of the state - Randolph Bourne
This classic first part of an essay entitled "The State," left unfinished at Bourne's untimely death in 1918, it explores the connection between patriotism, war, and the State.
To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant the war [World War I] brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought.
1915-1920: Red Clydeside and the shop stewards' movement
An account of the powerful workers' movement in Scotland and the strike of 100,000 for a 40-hour week in 1919 which was savagely attacked by the government on what became known as Bloody Friday.
Although unemployment decreased slightly in the few years immediately preceding the beginning of hostilities, inflation rose dramatically, increasing the prices of foodstuffs, rents and fuel, but decreasing workers’ wages by 15%. While conditions at work were fairly miserable, workers had to return to bad housing where overcrowding was not uncommon and disease rampant.
1895-1921: The CGT, France
A history of the anarchist origins of the largest trade union in France and the development and decline of revolutionary ideas and practice within it.
Revolutionary Syndicalism in the French CGT
1915: The Glasgow rent strike
The history of a months-long rent strike of 30,000 Glasgow residents against profiteering landlords, forcing the government to freeze rents for the duration of World War I.
During the First World War, rent increases across Glasgow provoked massive working class opposition, mainly from women organised in tenants’ groups. Their struggle against profiteering landlords during extremely difficult circumstances is a valuable example of how collective action really gets results.
