Among the very first actions of the Soviets, the day after taking power, was to establish a system of universal and comprehensive education with Anatoly Lunacharsky, a Marxist intellectual, erudite and with an expansive, educated, and sophisticated appreciation of society’s arts, particularly its literature. He would be Commissar of Education from its founding until 1929. […]
A wonderful article in which the working-class Socialist who married rich is asked by a liberal paper what she should do with ‘her’ money. Her priceless response was denied publication. Thankfully, the REVOLT stepped in and printed it. Born Rose Wieslander to a poor Jewish family in what is now Poland, she immigrated to the […]
Writing for A. Philip Randolph's 'The Messenger' long-time wobbly activist and Philadelphia longshore workers' leader Ben Fletcher explains the history of Marine Transport Workers' Union Local 8 of the I.W.W. and why they have chosen to leave the Industrial Workers of the World after a decade as one of that organizations' most successful Locals.
The October 1929 Wall Street Crash was a before-and-after moment for the 20th century and is here analyzed shortly after by Harrison George. It is always illuminating to read contemporary reactions and analyses of past, transformative events, as they were necessarily understood by history and contemporary conditions; while we live with, and largely understand, those […]
Both in exile at the same time in Soviet Russia from persecutions in the U.S., Goldman and Haywood draw sharply different conclusions from their experience, born of their competing and conflicting notions of the liberation struggle, its agents, and its methods. Deported from the U.S. in December, 1919 to Soviet Russia, whatever sympathies Goldman had […]
An extraordinary early letter from Parsons on the racist reality of the U.S. and the specter of a righteous, avenging, Black revolt. Born in bondage, the early life of Lucy Parsons, as you would expect, is obscure. She seems to have been born in bondage around 1851, likely in Virginia, to an enslaved women named […]
A chapter from Hillquit’s book on the pioneering Socialist whose work spanned decades and continents. ‘Wilhelm Weitling and the General Working-Men’s League’ by Morris Hillquit from History of Socialism in the United States. Funk and Wagnalls Publishers, New York. 1910. WILHELM WEITLING was born in Magdeburg in 1808 as the illegitimate child of a woman […]
Togliatti pays tribute to the central figure of the Italian workers’ movement on his death. Long a leader of the Socialist movement in Italy, Giacinto Serrati was a Zimmerwaldist and attended the Second Comintern Congress in early 1920, serving on its Presidium and debating with Lenin. A ‘conciliator’, Serrati broke with the Comintern over the […]
After Marcus Garvey was sent to federal prison in 1925 the Universal Negro Improvement Association, so dominant in Black politics for a decade, came to an impasse. Robert Minor, a leading white Communist voice for a central orientation of the U.S. party to Black workers in the 1920s, with an essay on the divisions and […]
Hugely important in organizing the garment industry in the large Eastern cities, the New York branch of the N.W.T.U.L. reports on a year of work, with the main thrust of the work expanding from the base in the Yiddish-speaking communities into English-speaking shops. ‘Women’s Trade Union League Reports on Progress Made’ from The New York […]
