Workers' Liberty

“For the first time in the history of the labour movement the struggle is being so conducted that its three sides, the theoretical, the political, and the practical-economic (opposition to the capitalists), form one harmonious and well-planned entity”. Frederick Engels, 1874

In 1919 Glasgow was in the grip of a general strike. Although the strike began with the limited demand of a cut in the working Week, it raised — as general strikes do by their very nature — the question of power in society.

1919 was a year of turmoil all over Europe.

In Dublin, 61 years ago, March 1947, an immense crowd of people, 200,000 of them, many of the men bare-headed in freakishly Arctic weather, marched behind the coffin of Jim Larkin.

Evolving out of the trade unions, adopting a formal commitment to socialism only in 1918, two decades after its formation, the Labour Party puzzled and perplexed European Marxists.