Böcker av Dave Sherry

This updated edition of John Maclean: Red Clydesider marks the centenary of the death of John Maclean; the Glasgow schoolteacher who became one of the finest socialist leaders the British working class has ever produced. A fierce opponent of empire, Britain''s war cabinet saw Maclean as public enemy number one, whereas Lenin and the leaders of the first ever workers'' government in Russia regarded him as Britain''s outstanding revolutionary. A key figure of Red Clydeside, Maclean was involved with the Clyde Workers'' Committee, which spearheaded the rank and file revolt against the dismantling of trade union conditions during the First World War. He campaigned against spiraling wartime prices and helped lead the successful Glasgow rent strike of 1915, which pioneered council housing. He was only forty four when he died of pneumonia in November 1923. Yet his powerful legacy of -anti-imperialism and commitment to workers'' power lives on, making him a figure from history whose political mess

This year we will see a cascade of patriotic froth surrounding the anniversary of the First World War, which is to be reinvented as a time when the whole nation united against an external threat and through immense sacrifice and heroism triumphed. WWI was, however, a clash of empires. Both the British and the German ruling classes were prepared for any number of dead and maimed to advance their imperial interests. As Dave Sherry shows in this accessible history, working class people suffered during WWI, but also began to fight back in the Russian and German revolutions.