1870s

From Volume 24 of 'Marx & Engels - Collected Works'; Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1989.

The seamen's strike in 1878 was the first intercolonial dispute in Australia. The Australasian Steam Navigation Company decided to replace all their Australian seamen with Chinese seamen in late 1878. The reason: they were paying Australian seamen eight pounds per month, but could get away with paying Chinese seamen three pounds per month.

Beginning with opposition to wage cuts and poor conditions the strikes led to near-insurrections in parts of Pennsylvania. Heavy repression hit the strikers and other American workers and despite winning some concessions eventually the strikes were broken, leaving 100 dead.

A sheriff in the Hudson River Valley near Albany, New York, about to go into the hills in the fall of 1839 to collect back rents from tenants on the enormous Rensselaer estate, was handed a letter:

... the tenants have organized themselves into a body, and resolved not to pay any more rent until

A short history of the Paris Commune, weak on details of the revolution and working class organisation but with good information about the makeup of the elected Communards and details of the fighting and repression at the end of the Commune

The Paris Commune of 1871
undercurrent #6

Recently, the Sussex University library dedicated part of its space for a small exhibition on the Paris Commune. At first this came with some surprise: how was it that, in the midst of the boredom of academic life and the total lack of interest in any issues of importance, the library was willing to commemorate one of the most crucial proletarian revolutions of the nineteenth century? Yet, our surprise quickly vanished when we gave this exhibition a closer look. Not only is the exhibition of a purely academic nature (looking at historical events as spectacles and thus a-historically), but it is also taking the Commune out of context, describing it by using some of the most common illusions found in the bourgeois world. This article comes as a response to the exhibition.

From 18 March 1946 issue of Labor Action, newspaper of the Workers Party of the United States

C.L.R. James
They Showed the Way to Labor Emancipation:
On Karl Marx and the 75th Anniversary of the Paris Commune

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The American working class is not yet as familiar as the European working class with the history and traditions of the revolutionary socialist movement. March 14, anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, and March 18, anniversary of the Paris Commune will be celebrated by only a small minority.

P. Guillaume and M. Grainger

Solidarity Pamphlet 35

I. THE COMMUNE... FROM MARX TO TROTSKY.

'Each time we study the history of the Commune we see something new in it, thanks to the experiences gained, in later revolutionary struggles...' Thus wrote Trotsky in 1921, in his preface to a book by Tales[1] which was to become basic reading for a whole generation of French revolutionaries.

Karl Marx's contemporary account of the Paris Commune, placing it in context fo the wider events in France at the time. The Paris Commune significantly changed Marx's ideas about the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", and his support for it's organisation structures suggests a different trajectory of revolutionary organisation to the "Marxist" revolutions in the 20th Century.