Jeremy Brecher's history of the 1934 strike of dock workers and the San Francisco general strike it sparked, against casual hiring methods on the docks, which was bitterly opposed by employers, the state and the unions.
May 24, 2021
Harper’s Weekly/D. BendannRail strikers blockade engines at Martinsburg, West Virginia, in 1877. Karl Marx called their strike “the first uprising against the oligarchy of capital which had developed since the Civil War.” The working class together with oppressed toilers who are Black and exploited farmers would be the class forces of revolution in the U.S., he said.
The “Great Strike” of 1877, sparked by starvation wages and brutal working conditions, started among rail workers and then drew in more than half a million others. It alarmed the capitalist rulers. Federal, state and city governments unleashed troops, cops and gangs of thugs on strikers, cheered on by the bosses’ press. Karl Marx wrote that this mighty class battle “could very well be the point of origin for the creation of a serious workers’ party.” The excerpt below is from “The Railroad Uprisings of 1877,” in American Labor Struggles 1877-1934