This lecture was delivered by Max Boddy, assistant national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia), to the SEP (US) International Summer School, held between July 30 and August 4, 2023.
Andre Hoyles analyses the development, organisation and end of the mass strike in France, 1968, with reference to case studies of particular factories.
Sister machinist unions, San Francisco's Lodge 68 of the International Association of Machinists and Oakland's Local 1304 of the CIO's Steel Workers Organizing Committee (which left the IAM over a wildcat strike in 1936), had a national reputation for militancy; Lodge 68 had more strikes during World War II than all other Bay Area unions combined. Along with Local 1304, they accrued this strike record in open defiance of the National War Labor Board, who were backed by the FBI, the Office of Economic Stabilization in the White House, a Navy Vice-Admiral, the War Manpower Commission, the collective bosses, who in turn were supported by the CIO, ILWU, and Communist Party.
An account of the effects Russian Revolution on the Russian syndicalists and anarchists, and vice-versa, by a leading Russian anarcho-syndicalist of the time.