Bøger af Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

On February 25 Bill Foster, as he is known to thousands of railroad workers, miners, sailors, lumberjacks, and longshoremen, was sixty-eight. Today he is under arrest with eleven other members of the National Committee of the Communist Party, accused by the U.S. Government of the advocacy of political ideas. They are ideas of human freedom which began for Bill Foster with the sad Irish lullabies his mother sang and the glowing tales his Fenian father told of the age-long struggle for Irish freedom. William Foster was a great man who led not only the Communist Party in the USA, he was a strong union activist organizer. This is his story. The Appendix has two extra articles relating to Industrial Concentration. This reprint is a great asset not only for history but for fully understanding how our labor unions were started over a hundred years ago.

The pamphlets reprinted here were first published in the 1910s amid great controversy. Even then, the tactics of direct action and sabotage were often associated with the cartoonists’ image of the disheveled, wild-eyed anarchist armed with stiletto, handgun, or bomb—the clandestine activity of a militant minority or the desperate acts of the unorganized.The activist authors of the texts in this collection challenged the prevailing stereotypes. As they point out, the practices of direct action and sabotage are as old as class society itself and have been an integral part of the everyday work life of wage-earners in all times and places. To the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) belongs the distinction of being the first workers’ organization in the U.S. to discuss these common practices openly, and to recognize their place in working-class struggle. Viewing direct action and sabotage in the spirit of creative nonviolence, Wobblies readily integrated these tactics into their struggle to build industrial unions. Direct action is recognized as a valuable and effective tactic by many movements around the globe and remains a cutting-edge tool for social change. Whenever communities in struggle find more conventional methods of resistance closed to them, direct action and sabotage will be employed.This new edition from the Charles H. Kerr Library contains "Direct Action and Sabotage" (1912) by William E. Trautmann, "Sabotage: Its History, Philosophy & Function" (1913) by Walker C. Smith, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s "Sabotage: The Conscious Withdrawal of the Workers’ Industrial Efficiency" (1916), edited and with an introduction by Salvatore Salerno.