From the archive of struggle, no.35: Holt Labor Library special

In previous editions, I have featured the Labadie Collection and the Greater Manchester Collection. This week, we focus on the Holt Labor Library, with more below the fold. Browse the whole series here.

The Holt Labor Library in San Francisco has a truly exemplary website. Below are some snippets from some of its exhibitions, which are hyperlinked to their source pages.

The Bob Mattingly Button Exhibit.

[1991] Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) was formed in 1976 from a number of reform groups including Teamsters for a Democratic Contract and UPSurge. They were reacting to corruption within the union caused by leadership being too close to businesses, as well as their alleged affiliation with organized crime and the Nixon administration. Professionals Drivers’ Council (PROD) merged with TDU in 1979, bringing their lobbying and legal expertise, and new members from the East Coast and South. As a reform group within the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, TDU believes in a democratic union with control resting in the membership. Their Rank and File Bill of Rights emphasizes election of union leadership, majority approval of contract votes, equality throughout the union, workplace standards and fair salaries. Over the years, several of their goals have been implemented union-wide. In 1988, Majority Rule on Contracts became part of the IBT Constitution. TDU won direct election of officers through a federal RICO lawsuit in 1989. With the election of TDU-backed Ron Carey as Teamsters president in 1991, officers’ pay was slashed and financial waste ended. The TDU was active in the successful 1997 UPS strike. They supported Tyson Foods workers in Pasco, Washington in 1999 who called a strike even without IBT support. Today they continue their reform struggle against current IBT president James Hoffa, Jr., who they blame for new corruption and a loss of union membership.

[1984] United Farm Workers (UFW) leader César Chávez called for a third boycott on California table grapes in 1984. Whereas previous UFW boycotts had been about farm worker conditions, this one called for a ban on five major pesticides used in grape fields. The UFW claimed in their 1989 film, “Wrath of Grapes,” that the chemicals caused cancer and birth defects, and that they were getting into the ground water of surrounding communities. Chávez went on a 36-day hunger strike in 1988 to promote the boycott, receiving support from many politicians and celebrities. Later that year, city leaders in San Francisco, San Jose and Alameda County joined the boycott. UFW continued its boycott after Chávez’s death in 1993, ending it in 2000 when four of the five pesticides in question had been banned and the fifth regulated.

[1996] “The long-running, low key but aggresive campaign to organize a new party anchored firmly inside the American Labor Movement, will culminate next June in Cleveland, Ohio when delegates from across the nation formally launch a grassroots, working class-based political movement.” (Labor Party Advocate, August 1995) According to the organization’s website, the founding conference attracted “1,400 delegates from hundreds of local and international unions as well as individual activists.” They adopted a 16-point program, the “Call for Economic Justice,” that “demands that everyone who wants to work have a right to a decent-paying job. As long as millions of us remain jobless or employed at jobs that pay poverty wages, all of us will suffer.” (Labor Party: FAQs. http://www.thelaborparty.org/a_faqs.html )

Holt Labor Library Audio Collection

A selection of the library’s audio collection is online in mp3 format, hosted by the Marxists Internet Archive. Currently, lectures by George Breitman, James P. Cannon, Farrell Dobbs, Tom Kerry, Ernest Mandel, Robert Langston, Larry Trainor, Evelyn Reed and Harry Ring are available, with more to be added.

There are also special features, each with lots of links, on topics such as the San Francisco General Strike of 1934 (including folk song sheet music), the late Sylvia Weinstein, Sacco and Venzetti, Joe Hill, the Lawrence textiles strike, and the United Farm Workers of America.

The rest

Rustbelt Radical:

* Eugene Debs: John Brown, History’s greatest hero (1907)

Marxist Internet Archive:

* Max Eastman: Since Lenin died (1925)

*Added to the Natalya Krupskaya Archive: How Lenin Studied Marx, 1933

*Added to the C.L.R. James Archive:
**Why Negroes Should Oppose the War (Socialist Workers Party pamphlet, 1939)
**Lecture on Federation (West Indies and British Guiana) (Speech delivered in what was then British Guiana June, 1958)
**West Indians of East Indian Descent (IBIS pamphlet, 1965)
**Walter Rodney and the Question of Power (Speech given January 1, 1981)

*The Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line has added to the ETOL Newspaper & Journal collection articles from a variety of important British Revolutionary Marxists writing for Labour Review between 1958 and 1960:
**‘Export of Revolution’, 1917-1924, by Brian Pearce
**The First International, ed. and trans. by Hans Gerth, reviewed by Henry Collins
**The Economics of Communist Eastern Europe, by Nicolas Spulber, reviewed by Tom Kemp
**Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 1915-1918, ed. by Z.A.B. Zeman, reviewed by Brian Pearce
**Stalin’s Correspondence with Churchill, Attlee, Roosevelt and Truman, 1941-45, reviewed by Brian Pearce
**Race Riots: the Socialist Answer, by Cliff Slaughter
**The Pasternak Affair, by Alan MacDonald
**Marxists in the Second World War, by William Hunter
**The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile, by Henry Pelling, reviewed by Brian Pearce
**The Worker Views his Union, by Joel Seidman, Jack London, Bernard Karsh and Daisy L. Tagliacozzo, reviewed by Jock Stevens
**Death on the Left, by John Connell, reviewed by G. Gale
**Freedom and Revolution, by Alasdair MacIntyre
**Building the Bolshevik Party, by Brian Pearce
**The Shop Stewards’ Movement and Workers’ Control, 1910-1922, by B. Pribicevic, reviewed by Brian Pearce
**1931 Political Crisis, by R. Bassett, reviewed by Bill Parry
**Communism and British Intellectuals, by Neal Wood, reviewed by Bill Parry
**Over-centralisation in Economic Administration, by Janos Kornai, reviewed by Tom Kemp
**Dawn in Nyasaland, by Guy Clutton-Brock, reviewed by Ade Olu
**Soviet Prose, Hingley, edit., reviewed by Brian Pearce
**Police, by John Coatman, reviewed by Brian Pearce

*Added to the Alfred Rosmer Archive: British Imperialism and French Imperialism After The London Conference (1924)

*Added to the Writers Section of the Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line is the new Julius Jacobson Archive. Jacobson was the founder of the New Politics [New York] magazine, a “Third Camp Socialist” review:
**Standing Fast, a biography by Barry Finger
**Civil Liberties and the Philosopher of the Cold War Writing as Julius Falk for New International (and in concujction with Gordon Haskell). [1955]
**The Peters Case Writing as Julius Falk for New International. [1955]
**Magazine Chronicle review Writing as Julius Falk for New International (and in concujction with Abe Stein). [1955]
**Leninism, The Comintern and Putschism Writing as Julius Falk [1965]
**Isaac Deutscher: The Anatomy of an Apologist [1965]
**Reflections on Fascism and Communism [1983

* Added to the Isaac Deutscher Archive : Roots of Bureaucracy
* Added to the Spanish Archivo Ernest Mandel, two articles: Lecciones de mayo del 68 (1968) y Treinta preguntas y treinta respuestas en torno a la nueva “Historia del Partido Comunista de la Union Soviética” (1960)

Lubitz Trotskyanna:

* The new edition of the Lubitz Trotsky bibliography.
* Recently added or revised: Bio-bibliographies of James P Cannon and Anton Grylewicz (German socialist and later Trotskyist, active up to 1937).

Notes and Commentaries:

* E.H. Carr: The Left Today (1978)

Anarkismo:

*Federación Anarquista Uruguaya “Huerta Grande” (1972)

Note: the next entries are via Ent.

Workers’ Liberty :

* Ernie Haberkern: Fascism: police measures don’t solve political problems (1997)
* Thomas Carolan: The left we have and the left we need (1997)
* Sean Matgamna: Ireland: a challenge to the left (1997)

* Jack Brad: How Mao conquered China (1948/1949, with a foreword by Hal Draper, 1970)
* Fusion platform of Workers’ Socialist League (WSL) and International-Communist League (I-CL), July 1981 (1981)
* Colin Foster: The revolt of the German miners (1997)
* Chen Ying: The moderniser as executioner (1997)
* Annie O’Keeffe: There is only one socialist answer on Europe: workers unite! (1997)
* Colin Foster: The left and Europe (1997)
* Jim Denham: Blair wins a place in the Sun (1997)

Espace contre ciment:

* Guy Debord: Notes sur la « question des immigrés » (1985)
* Leo Trotzki: Der Geist der „deutschen Sprache“ in der Politik (~ 1939, Auszug aus der Stalinbiographie)
* Rudolf Rocker: Soziales Elend und Revolution (19??, Auszug aus Im Sturm der Zeiten, Bd. 2)
* G. Cheptou: La liberté par en bas. Rudolf Rocker. De l’anarcho-syndicalisme au pragmatisme libertaire (2007)
* Einspruch gegen die Kapitulationen von 1937, vor den Libertären der Gegenwart und der Zukunft – Von einem „Unkontrollierten“ der Eisenkolonne (1937)
* André Prudhommeaux: Ceux qu’il nous faut connaître : les communistes de conseil (1947)
* André Prudhommeaux: Eloge de la pudeur (1955)
* Les Amis de Quat­re Mil­li­ons de Jeu­nes Tra­vail­leurs: Un monde sans argent: le communisme (1975-76)
* Gustav Landauer: Lernt nicht Esperanto! (1907)
* Gustav Landauer: Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft (1900)
* Jacques Camatte: Kapital und Gemeinwesen (1976)

* Simone Weil: Sur le livre de Lénine « Matérialisme et empiriocriticisme » (1933)
* Otto Rühle: Flucht in den Buddhismus (1925)
* Gustav Landauer: Schwache Staatsmänner, schwächeres Volk! (1910)
* Gustav Landauer: Die französischen Syndikalisten (1909)
* Amadeo Bordiga: A Janitzio on n‘a pas peur de la mort (1961)
* André Prudhommeaux: Le martyre obligatoire (1938)
* Karl Kraus: Das technoromantische Abenteuer (1918)
* Yahya Sadowski: Die Sache mit der Öl (2003)

La Bataille Socialiste:

* Affiche pour un meeting du POUM le 21-03-1937
* Victor Serge: Modigliani est mort (1947)
* Rosa Luxemburg: Lettre à Henriette Roland-Holst (1904)
* Grandizo Munis: Portrait de Daniel de Leon (1979)
* International Council Correspondence: Les conseils ouvriers et l’organisation communiste de l’économie (1935)
* Solidaridad Obrera: Entrevista a Durruti (1936)
* Ngo Vanh: Avec Maximilien Rubel… Combats pour Marx 1954–1996: une amitié, une lutte (1997)
* Arnold Petersen: Preface to ‘Reform or Revolution’ (1947)
* Arnold Petersen: Preface to Socialist Reconstruction of Society (1930)
* Arnold Petersen: Introduction to What Means This Strike? (1946)
* Socialisme Mondial: Majorité consciente et violence (1974)
* Jules Guesde: Une formule prétendue communiste (1882)

* Jaime Balius: En el Frente de Aragón. La Columna Durruti (1936)
* Grandizo Munis: ¡Vivan los combatientes de mayo! (1945)
* Grandizo Munis: Lecciones de una derrota. Una entrevista con Munis (1939)
* Grandizo Munis: Carta a un obrero poumista (1938)
* Karl Korsch: La philosophie de Lénine (1938)
* August Thalheimer: Brief an Clara Zetkin (1928)
* Paul Avrich: Bolshevik Opposition to Lenin: G. T. Miasnikov and the Workers’ Group (1984)
* Collective Action Notes: From the Bottom Up – Anton Pannekoek (1996)
* Pierre Souyri: L’Etat bureaucratique à la conquête de la Chine (1960/1982)
* Bureau International pour le Parti Révolutionnaire (BIPR): L’Organisation Mondiale du Commerce est un symptôme (1999)
* Paul Mattick: Otto Rühle (1960)

LibCom:

* Victor Garcia: 1936-1967: A history of Spanish anarchist youth paper ‘Ruta’ (1978)
* John Quail: The slow burning fuse – the lost history of the British anarchists (1978)
** 05. Anarchism Develops in the Socialist League

Archive.org:

* Andreu Nin: La huelga general de enero y sus enseanzas (1934)
* Albert Weisbord: Passaic; the story of a struggle against starvation wages and for the right to organize (1926)
* The Labour annual: the reformers’ year-book (1908)
* William Lovett/Working Men’s Association: The people’s charter; with the address to the Radical reformers of Great Britain and Ireland, and a brief sketch of its origin (1848)

Syndikalismusforschung:

* Erich Mühsam Absage an die Rote Hilfe (1929)
* Fanal: Karl Roche vom Kampfplatz abgetreten (1931)
* Rudolf Rocker: Фантом национального единства (1919)
* Rudolf Rocker: Национализм – источник опасности! (~ 1950)
* Rudolf Rocker: Государство и Война (~ 1950)
* Rudolf Rocker: Абсолютистские представления в социализме (1950)
* Rudolf Rocker: Георг Вильгельм Фридрих Гегель (?)
* Rudolf Rocker: Социал-демократия и анархизм (~ 1899)

From the Archive of Struggle, no.34, here.