1910s

The strike movement of Liverpool occurred during the great period of industrial unrest that was to grip Britain between 1910 and the outbreak of the First World War. Beginning with a walk-out of seamen, the strike soon snowballed and went on to reach epic proportions, involving up to 70,000 people.

Lenin's famous manual of reformism, "Left Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder(1920), which directed Communists to work within parliament and existing labour unions, was partly a response to British anti-parliamentarism.

It's still a matter of conjecture what convinced “Rube” Munson and the WCU there was going to be a national rebellion.

I'd like to thank the work of Oklahoma grass-roots historians and journalists for finding and publishing period newspaper accounts

This online version taken from http://www.marxists.org

From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution

1 The Bourgeois Revolutions

1919 Steel Strike
October 3, 1919

The Steel Strike Still Holds Public Attention

October 10, 1919

The Steel Strike is Still On
With Few if Any Changes

“Where the men and women think lightly of the laws; . . . . where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons; . . . . where outside authority enters after the precedence of inside authority; where the citizen is always the head and ideal; where children are taught to be laws to themselves; . . . there the great city stands.” - Walt Whitman.

The One Big Union was founded a mere two months before it was baptized by the Winnipeg General Strike. The founding Convention was held in the Calgary Labour Temple (which still stands today, though it has been converted into a Chinese Restaurant).

In May of 1919 a heat wave crossed the province. Edmonton had reached temperatures of 85 degrees. Like the heat wave a mood of union militancy was in the air across Alberta, indeed across Western Canada. A strike wave would soon erupt sweeping the West like a prairie fire.

The Workers Opposition began to form in 1919, as a result of the policies of War Communism, which set a precedence for the domination of the Communist Party over local party branches and trade unions. During the civil war, the Workers Opposition began agitating against the lack of democracy in the Communist Party as a result of the centralising actions of the party’s bureaucracy.