5. Working-Class Collective Agency: The General Strike and Labor Insurgency

2019 ◽  
pp. 96-119
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Collective Agency ◽  
General Strike

Soviet and Comintern Policies Toward the British General Strike of 1926

1953 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morton H. Cowden
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
General Strike

The first general strike in the history of England, with its mass labor action, was bound to attract strong interest from the workers' state which proclaimed as its rallying cry: “Workers of All Countries, Unite!” Soviet concern for the British working class followed logically from the active participation of Marx and Engels in the movement, and the continued attention shown by Lenin to this important “section” of the “world proletariat.”

The English Roman Catholic Bishops and The Social Order, 1918–26

2001 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-564
Author(s):  
Kester Aspden
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Pastoral Letter ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Social ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
General Strike ◽  
The Church

It is ironic that it should have been the leader of the church with the greatest proportion of working-class members who took up the most hostile stance to the General Strike of 1926. While Francis Bourne (1862–1935), Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, won the plaudits of the Establishment for his unambiguous denunciation of the strike, that cautious septuagenarian Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, found himself cast in the unlikely role of the workers’ friend after his illstarred attempt to conciliate the two sides. Sheridan Gilley has highlighted another contrast: while in 1926 Bourne found himself sharply opposed to labour, in a 1918 pastoral letter he had been insistent that the Church should reach an accommodation with the ‘modern labour unrest’. While Gilley implies that his General Strike condemnation was uncharacteristic, Buchanan suggests that this was closer to expressing his ‘real political views’ than his 1918 statement. This article aims to provide a closer examination of the shift in Bourne’s attitude, and to consider the broader episcopal response to social and political questions during these fraught years.

scholarly journals Strike Action and Working-Class Politics on Clydeside 1914–1919

1990 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Foster
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
The Political ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Strike Activity ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
Structural Weakness ◽  
General Strike

SUMMARYThe record of strike activity on Clydeside is used to explore the interaction between workplace organisation and political attitudes in working-class communities, focussing in particular upon the shipyard labour force in the years immediately preceding the 1919 General Strike. The findings are used to question research by Iain McLean which minimised the political significance of industrial militancy during the period of the Red Clyde and that by Alastair Reid, which argued that the main consequences of wartime industrial experience were to strengthen social democratic perspectives. It is suggested that a limited but significant radicalisation did occur and that this was related to the specific labour relations practices of employers in the west of Scotland and the structural weakness of Clydeside's economy.

Sorel, Georges (1847–1922)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Jennings
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Social Theorist ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Economic Foundations ◽  
General Strike

The French social theorist Georges Sorel is best known for his controversial work Réflexions sur la violence (Reflections on Violence), first published in 1908. He here argued that the world could be saved from ‘barbarism’ through acts of proletarian violence, most notably the general strike. This, he believed, would not only establish an ethic of the producers but would also serve to secure the economic foundations of socialism. Moreover the inspiration for these heroic deeds would be derived from a series of ‘myths’ that encapsulated the highest aspirations of the working class. More broadly Sorel should be seen as an innovator in Marxist theory and the methodology of the social sciences.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-192
Author(s):  
James Edward Ford
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Divine Violence ◽  
Fugitive Slave ◽  
The Law ◽  
Critique Of Violence ◽  
General Strike

Notebook 3 continues to build on the concept of the multitude. Du Bois calls the region of the multitude that pursues truth and justice the “dark proletariat.” This chapter theorizes the dark proletariat’s revolutionary force analyzing the argument and form of Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, especially the chapters on “The General Strike” and “The Coming of the Lord.” With this analysis, Du Bois’s account of the dark proletariat during the Civil War marks the historical expression of the divine violence Walter Benjamin identifies but cannot historically locate in his enigmatic essay “Critique of Violence.” Divine violence undoes the guilt that binds the oppressed to the law and State. While Benjamin sought his example among the working class in Europe’s metropoles, Du Bois makes the figure of the fugitive slave the protagonist of his narrative.

The City of Opportunity?

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-72
Author(s):  
Molly C. Ball
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Food Markets ◽  
Textile Production ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
The Family ◽  
The City ◽  
General Strike

This chapter explores working-class residents’ daily lives, standards of living, and challenges in São Paulo between 1891 and 1918. Examining this understudied period underscores the dramatic changes World War I wrought in the city. Wartime shortages disrupted the natural ebb and flow of migration, job opportunities, and urbanization, making a difficult reality more challenging for much of the city’s working class. Some scholars have argued that the war incentivized textile production and encouraged growth, but evidence from immigrant letters and prices demonstrates increased costs for low-quality textiles. The war also cut short job opportunities and educational advancements, saw a slowdown in most standard-of-living measures, and institutionalized the family wage and informality. While city officials founded weekly food markets to assist with rising food costs, these efforts were insufficient. By 1917, the situation had deteriorated enough to provide the necessary conditions for workers, both women and men, to mobilize a general strike.

scholarly journals Anarchy and Culture: Fernand Pelloutier and the Dilemma of Revolutionary Syndicalism

1963 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan B. Spitzer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Moral Crisis ◽  
General Strike ◽  
Intellectual Crisis

Advancing under socialist banners, the labor movement in Western Europe won such success by the end of the nineteenth century as to produce a deep moral and intellectual crisis in European socialism. Internecine quarrels over revisionism, participationism, and antipolitical syndicalism reflected the malaise of a “revolutionary” movement that each year bound itself more closely to the system it had vowed to destroy. For socialist theoreticians, the crisis was cognitive or “scientific” – it had to do with issues of adequate historical analysis and prediction – but for the theorists of French revolutionary syndicalism it was essentially a moral crisis. In their eyes the socialist parties had already failed because they were the instruments for manipulation and betrayal of the workers by leaders whose ambitions could be gratified through the capitalist establishment. They identified a practical and moral alternative to political socialism in the revolutionary general strike prepared and carried out by autonomous proletarian organizations. Such organizations were necessary to the idealists of the general strike if their programs were not to degenerate into a strictly verbal revolutionary Couéism and they therefore put great stock in the development of militant working-class associations. Among these, the Bourses du Travail, which flourished from 1895 to 1901 under the dedicated direction of the anarchist intellectual, Fernand Pelloutier, seemed the most promising.

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