Strikes and trade union history

Can we build a revolutionary workers' movement?

In Solidarity 3/199, we printed an “open letter to a direct-action activist” as a contribution to the debate about actions which took place around the TUC-organised 26 March “March for the Alternative”, and the relationship of those actions and the activists involved to the mass labour movement. Ira Berkovic continues that debate by examining arguments which come up in discussion among anti-capitalist activists about the mass labour movement and involvement in it. Argument: trade unions are a spent force. They’re half the size they were in the 1970s; most workers know little about trade unions...

Defend May Day!

The Tories are scrapping our jobs, benefits and public services. Now they plan to scrap May Day bank holiday and replace it with a “UK Day”. For socialists May Day is more than maypoles and Morris dancing — it is International Workers’ Day. The idea of a workers’ day began around the demand for the eight-hour day — Australian workers in 1856 coincided a strike with demonstrations, meetings and entertainment. The idea quickly spread to other countries — 1 May 1886 strikes were held throughout the US, including Chicago where twelve were shot dead by police, and organisers were later arrested and...

Remembering Mary Bamber in Liverpool

To commemorate international women’s day in Liverpool, a statue has been put up on St George’s Plateau of Mary Bamber. Mary was a supporter of the Russian revolution and a founding member of the Communist Party — when it was a revolutionary organisation. A socialist, an organiser of working-class women, a supporter of the 1911 transport strike, and on the Bloody Sunday march in that dispute. She was a comrade of Sylvia Pankhurst — who broke with the right-wing suffragettes. In 1920, she attended the Second Congress of the Third International in Moscow. She was a local committee member on the...

Dorothy Thompson: historian of Chartism

Labour and socialist historian Dorothy Thompson died on 29 January at the age of 87. She is best known for her large and tremendously important work on the 19th century Chartist movement. Thompson took an over-arching view of Chartism as a movement, never overlooking the contributions of the individual men and women involved. She studied in detail the culture of Chartism and the role of gender within it, without retreating from what was at root a class analysis. In The Early Chartists (1971) she stressed the diversity of Chartism while emphasising its national character. Her major work, The...

Workers film and video

“Workers Film and Video” is a new website which aims to bring together into a single site links to footage of key events in working-class history. Material already accessible through the site, which was set up only earlier this year, includes both historical material, such as the 1905 Russian Revolution and the German Spartakist Uprising in 1919, and also more contemporary material, such as last year’s workers’ protests in Egypt. Not all of the footage to which is the site links is unedited footage of events. The site also links to debates and documentaries about topics such as the French...

The chainmakers' champion

For as long as workers have been fighting for their rights there have been key women organising other women and fighting alongside men. We begin a series on these inspirational women, often hidden from history. Mary MacArthur was a socialist and trade unionist. She had what Labour MP Margaret Bondfield described as “boundless energy and leadership of a high order’. Mary left Glasgow for London (at the age of 23) in 1903 to pursue political activity, leaving behind the man she loved and who wanted to marry her. Mary was active in the women’s suffrage movement, trade unions and the Independent...

The inspirational Jayaben Desai

An indication of the regard in which Jayaben Desai was held was the fact that on a miserable December weekday morning over one hundred people turned out for her funeral. A good proportion were there to show their respect for the inspirational woman who came to represent the Grunwick strikers of 1976-1978. Many photographs of the strike show a diminutive Mrs Desai towered over by large policemen, but she was never intimidated by anyone. When she walked out of the photoprocessing plant she said to the manager: “What you are running here is not a factory, it is a zoo. But in a zoo there are many...

The "Plebs" go on strike

As Ruskin students and their contacts amongst former students became aware of the drive by people in the Workers’ Educational Association and University Extension movement to take control of Ruskin, they began to organise themselves against it. During the “strike” that followed the enforced resignation of their principal Dennis Hird, a qualitative change occurred in their strategy, as a result of which 29 of the current students, again supported by former students, threw their energies into creating a new institution, the Central Labour College. From the early days of Ruskin Hall onwards, its...

The origin of the Plebs League: "The Burning Question of Education"

Achieving control of Ruskin College was central to the WEA/extension project. From the summer of 1907 onwards, its supporters threw themselves into open propaganda, behind-the-scenes lobbying and bureaucratic manoeuvring — all aimed at purging the college of whatever stood in their way. As well as setting up the committee to oversee the writing of Oxford and Working-Class Education, setting out the structure and to some degree the content of study at Ruskin College, the August 1907 Oxford Delegacy/WEA conference also set up an Oxford Tutorial Classes Committee, with Oxford tutor William Temple...

Oxford University and working-class education

Under the pressure of rising working-class self assertion across the country, the University extension movement accepted Albert Mansbridge’s scheme for tutorial classes and committed study (as opposed to more “popular” bigger lecture classes). This acceptance was spearheaded by a group of young, socialistic Oxford tutors. Supported by prominent figures in the church, civil service and ruling class generally, members of this group worked with Mansbridge himself and the other main Workers’ Educational Association activist, J MacTavish, to produce a report, Oxford and Working-Class Education. In...

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