Virtually everything Marx and Engels ever wrote on labor strikes and trade unions has been collected in this volume for the first time. It includes vivid, often eyewitness accounts of many of the greatest strikes and labor struggles of the last century. This original and valuable collection challenges the prevailing assumption that Marx and Engels cared little for trade unions and their role in the transition to socialism or that they had little practical involvement with unions. Lapides illuminates the immense part personally played by Marx and Engels in helping to establish the modern labor movement. Covering the period 1844-1894, the book features graphic and moving portrayals of contemporary labor stuggles, candid personal views of various labor leaders, biting polemics against socialist rivals, and eloquent passages. Lapides provides an introduction that places the excerpts in historical and theoretical context.
"A tribune of the people reacts to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears." The authors of this book--Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Farrell Dobbs, and Jack Barnes--draw on generations of revolutionary struggles by working people to explain why organizing to strengthen the unions is not only essential to the fighting unity and political striking power of the working class. It's central to building a revolutionary proletarian party as well. But the activity of a workers party neither begins nor ends there. It begins by extending the party's political reach in all directions, to cities, towns, and farms. By exchanging views and experiences with all layers of workers, farmers, and other toilers--irrespective of skin color, language, religion or sex. By broadening cultural horizons and knowledge of history and the world. A tribune of the people uses every manifestation of capitalist oppression to explain why it's workers and our allies who can and will--in the course of struggles by the unions and beyond--lay the foundations for a world based not on violence and competition, but on solidarity among working people worldwide.
Labor Conflict and Capitalist Hegemony in Argentina delves into the dynamics of labor conflict during a decisive moment in the history of Neoliberalism and its crisis. How did workers react to labor flexibilization, market reforms and massive layoffs? In what way were employers able to keep hold of industrial hegemony during the crisis of Neoliberalism? This book explores these questions from a Marxian approach on peripheral capitalist countries with the aim of contributing to a new conceptualization of labor relations, labor history and collective class action. The analysis focuses on the automotive industry in Argentina between 1990 and 2007 although framed in broader temporal dynamics. Labor conflict and capitalist hegemony in Argentina relata la dinámica del conflicto laboral en el período crucial de la historia del neoliberalismo y su crisis. ¿Cómo reaccionaron los trabajadores frente a la flexibilización laboral, las reformas de mercado y los despidos masivos? ¿De qué modo los empresarios mantuvieron la hegemonía industrial en la crisis del neoliberalismo? El libro formula las preguntas a partir de una aplicación del análisis marxiano para los países periféricos capitalistas. Sobre esta base se propone una conceptualización novedosa de las relaciones laborales, la historia sindical y la acción colectiva de clase. El análisis está enfocado en la industria automotriz argentina entre 1990 y 2007 aunque enmarcado en dinámicas temporales más amplias.
There are many narrative histories of the struggles of British workers. However, Rob Sewell's book is different. This book is aimed especially at class-conscious workers who are seeking to escape from the ills of the capitalist system, that has embroiled the world in a quagmire of wars, poverty and suffering. This history of trade unions is particularly relevant at the present time. After a long period of stagnation, the fresh winds of the class struggle are beginning to blow. Rob Sewell's book was written precisely with these new forces in mind. The British labour movement is the oldest in the world. More than two hundred years ago, the pioneers of the movement created illegal revolutionary trade unions in the face of the most terrible violence and repression. In the course of the nineteenth century they built trade unions of the downtrodden unskilled workers - those with "blistered hands and the unshorn chins," as Feargus O'Connor called them. Finally, they established a mass party of Labour based on the trade unions, breaking the monopoly of the Tories and Liberals. In the stormy years following the Russian Revolution they engaged in ferocious class battles, culminating in the General Strike of 1926. Nor did the achievements of the British trade union movement cease with the Depression and the Second World War. The post-war upswing served to strengthen the working class and heal the scars of the inter-war period. By the time of the industrial tidal wave of the early 1970s, they drove a Tory government from power, after turning Edward Heath's anti-trade union laws into a dead letter. Later, the miners, the traditional vanguard of the British working class, waged an epic year-long struggle in 1984-85 against the juggernaut of Thatcherism. They could have succeeded, had the rightwing Labour and trade union leaders not abandoned them and left them isolated. The book contains vital lessons and is essential reading for today's worker militants.
