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Industrial Workers of the World [Wobblies]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/18/20


IWW
Full name: Industrial Workers of the World
Founded: June 27, 1905; 114 years ago[1][2]
Members: Increase 5,875[a]
Journal: Industrial Worker
Key people: § Notable members
Office location: Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Country: International
Website: http://www.iww.org

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), members of which are commonly termed "Wobblies", is an international labor union that was founded in 1905 in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. The union combines general unionism with industrial unionism, as it is a general union, subdivided between the various industries which employ its members. The philosophy and tactics of the IWW are described as "revolutionary industrial unionism", with ties to both socialist[4] and anarchist labor movements.

In the 1910s and early 1920s, the IWW achieved many of their short-term goals, particularly in the American West, and cut across traditional guild and union lines to organize workers in a variety of trades and industries. At their peak in August 1917, IWW membership was more than 150,000, with active wings in the United States, Canada, and Australia.[5] The extremely high rate of IWW membership turnover during this era (estimated at 133% per decade) makes it difficult for historians to state membership totals with any certainty, as workers tended to join the IWW in large numbers for relatively short periods (e.g., during labor strikes and periods of generalized economic distress).[6]

Due to several factors, membership declined dramatically in the late 1910s and 1920s. There were conflicts with other labor groups, particularly the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which regarded the IWW as too radical, while the IWW regarded the AFL as too conservative and dividing workers by craft.[7] Membership also declined due to government crackdowns on radical, anarchist and socialist groups during the First Red Scare after World War I. In Canada the IWW was outlawed by the federal government.

Probably the most decisive factor in the decline in IWW membership and influence, however, was a 1924 schism in the organization, from which the IWW never fully recovered.[7][8]

The IWW promotes the concept of "One Big Union", and contends that all workers should be united as a social class to supplant capitalism and wage labor with industrial democracy.[9] They are known for the Wobbly Shop model of workplace democracy, in which workers elect their managers[10] and other forms of grassroots democracy (self-management) are implemented. IWW membership does not require that one work in a represented workplace,[11] nor does it exclude membership in another labor union.[12]

In 2012, the IWW moved its General Headquarters offices to 2036 West Montrose in Chicago.[13] The origin of the nickname "Wobblies" is uncertain.[14]

History 1905–1950

Main article: Industrial Workers of the World organizational evolution

Founding


Big Bill Haywood and office workers in the IWW General Office, Chicago, summer 1917.

The IWW was founded in Chicago, Illinois, in the United States in June 1905. A convention was held of 200 socialists, anarchists, Marxists (primarily members of the Socialist Party of America and Socialist Labor Party) radical trade unionists from all over the United States (mainly the Western Federation of Miners) who strongly opposed the policies of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The IWW opposed the American Federation of Labor's acceptance of capitalism and its refusal to include unskilled workers in craft unions.[15]

The convention had taken place on June 24, 1905, and was referred to as the "Industrial Congress" or the "Industrial Union Convention". It would later be known as the First Annual Convention of the IWW.[6]:67 It later became considered one of the most important events in the history of industrial unionism.[6]:67

The IWW's founders included William D. ("Big Bill") Haywood, James Connolly, Daniel De Leon, Eugene V. Debs, Thomas Hagerty, Lucy Parsons, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, Frank Bohn, William Trautmann, Vincent Saint John, Ralph Chaplin, and many others.

The IWW aimed to promote worker solidarity in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the employing class; its motto was "an injury to one is an injury to all", which improved upon the Knights of Labor's creed, "an injury to one is the concern of all" which was at its most popular in the 1880s. In particular, the IWW was organized because of the belief among many unionists, socialists, anarchists, Marxists, and radicals that the AFL not only had failed to effectively organize the U.S. working class, but it was causing separation rather than unity within groups of workers by organizing according to narrow craft principles. The Wobblies believed that all workers should organize as a class, a philosophy which is still reflected in the Preamble to the current IWW Constitution:

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.[9]

The first IWW charter in Canada, Vancouver Industrial Mixed Union no.322, May 5, 1906.

The Wobblies, as they were informally known, differed from other union movements of the time by promotion of industrial unionism, as opposed to the craft unionism of the American Federation of Labor. The IWW emphasized rank-and-file organization, as opposed to empowering leaders who would bargain with employers on behalf of workers. The early IWW chapters' consistently refused to sign contracts, which they believed would restrict workers' abilities to aid each other when called upon. Though never developed in any detail, Wobblies envisioned the general strike as the means by which the wage system would be overthrown and a new economic system ushered in, one which emphasized people over profit, cooperation over competition.

One of the IWW's most important contributions to the labor movement and broader push towards social justice was that, when founded, it was the only American union to welcome all workers, including women, immigrants, African Americans and Asians, into the same organization. Many of its early members were immigrants, and some, such as Carlo Tresca, Joe Hill and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, rose to prominence in the leadership. Finns formed a sizeable portion of the immigrant IWW membership. "Conceivably, the number of Finns belonging to the I.W.W. was somewhere between five and ten thousand."[16] The Finnish-language newspaper of the IWW, Industrialisti, published in Duluth, Minnesota, a center of the mining industry, was the union's only daily paper. At its peak, it ran 10,000 copies per issue. Another Finnish-language Wobbly publication was the monthly Tie Vapauteen ("Road to Freedom"). Also of note was the Finnish IWW educational institute, the Work People's College in Duluth, and the Finnish Labour Temple in Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada, which served as the IWW Canadian administration for several years. Further, many Swedish immigrants, particularly those blacklisted after the 1909 Swedish General Strike, joined the IWW and set up similar cultural institutions around the Scandinavian Socialist Clubs. This in turn exerted a political influence on the Swedish labour movement's left, that in 1910 formed the Syndicalist union SAC which soon contained a minority seeking to mimick the tactics and strategies of the IWW.[17] One example of the union's commitment to equality was Local 8, a longshoremen's branch in Philadelphia, one of the largest ports in the nation in the WWI era. Led by Ben Fletcher, an African American, Local 8 had more than 5,000 members, the majority of whom were African American, along with more than a thousand immigrants (primarily Lithuanians and Poles), Irish Americans, and numerous white ethnics.

Divide on political action or direct action

Main article: Industrial Workers of the World philosophy and tactics

In 1908 a group led by Daniel DeLeon argued that political action through DeLeon's Socialist Labor Party (SLP) was the best way to attain the IWW's goals. The other faction, led by Vincent Saint John, William Trautmann, and Big Bill Haywood, believed that direct action in the form of strikes, propaganda, and boycotts was more likely to accomplish sustainable gains for working people; they were opposed to arbitration and to political affiliation. Haywood's faction prevailed, and De Leon and his supporters left the organization, forming their own version of the IWW. The SLP's "Yellow IWW" eventually took the name Workers' International Industrial Union, which was disbanded in 1924.


The black cat symbol, created by IWW member Ralph Chaplin, is often used to signify sabotage or wildcat strikes.

Organizing


A Wobbly membership card, or "red card"

"The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands – the ownership and control of their livelihoods – are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease."

— Helen Keller, IWW member, 1911[18]

The IWW first attracted attention in Goldfield, Nevada in 1906 and during the Pressed Steel Car Strike of 1909[19] at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania. Further fame was gained later that year, when they took their stand on free speech. The town of Spokane, Washington, had outlawed street meetings, and arrested Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,[20] a Wobbly organizer, for breaking this ordinance. The response was simple but effective: when a fellow member was arrested for speaking, large numbers of people descended on the location and invited the authorities to arrest all of them, until it became too expensive for the town. In Spokane, over 500 people went to jail and four people died. The tactic of fighting for free speech to popularize the cause and preserve the right to organize openly was used effectively in Fresno, Aberdeen, and other locations. In San Diego, although there was no particular organizing campaign at stake, vigilantes supported by local officials and powerful businessmen mounted a particularly brutal counter-offensive.


1914 IWW demonstration in New York City

By 1912 the organization had around 25,000 members,[21] concentrated in the Northwest, among dock workers, agricultural workers in the central states, and in textile and mining areas. The IWW was involved in over 150 strikes, including the Lawrence textile strike (1912), the Paterson silk strike (1913) and the Mesabi range (1916). They were also involved in what came to be known as the Wheatland Hop Riot on August 3, 1913.

Geography

In its first decades, the IWW created more than 900 unions located in more than 350 cities and towns in 38 states and territories of the United States and 5 Canadian provinces.[22] Throughout the country, there were 90 newspapers and periodicals affiliated with the IWW, published in 19 different languages. Members of the IWW were active throughout the country and were involved in the Seattle General Strike,[23] were arrested or killed in the Everett Massacre,[24] organized among Mexican workers in the Southwest,[25] became a largest and powerful longshoremen's union in Philadelphia,[26] and more.

IWW versus AFL Carpenters, Goldfield, Nevada, 1907

The IWW assumed a prominent role in 1906 and 1907, in the gold-mining boom town of Goldfield, Nevada. At that time, the Western Federation of Miners was still an affiliate of the IWW (the WFM withdrew from the IWW in the summer of 1907). In 1906, the IWW became so powerful in Goldfield that it could dictate wages and working conditions.

Resisting IWW domination was the AFL-affiliated Carpenters Union. In March 1907, the IWW demanded that the mines deny employment to AFL Carpenters, which led mine owners to challenge the IWW. The mine owners banded together and pledged not to employ any IWW members. The mine and business owners of Goldfield staged a lockout, vowing to remain shut until they had broken the power of the IWW. The lockout prompted a split within the Goldfield workforce, between conservative and radical union members.[27]

The mine owners persuaded the Nevada governor to ask for federal troops. Under the protection of federal troops, the mine owners reopened the mines with non-union labor, breaking the influence of the IWW in Goldfield.

The Haywood trial and the exit of the Western Federation of Miners

Leaders of the Western Federation of Miners such as Bill Haywood and Vincent St. John were instrumental in forming the IWW, and the WFM affiliated with the new union organization shortly after the IWW was formed. The WFM became the IWW's "mining section." However, many in the rank and file of the WFM were uncomfortable with the open radicalism of the IWW, and wanted the WFM to maintain its independence. Schisms between the WFM and IWW had emerged at the annual IWW convention in 1906, when a majority of WFM delegates walked out.[6]

When WFM executives Bill Haywood, George Pettibone, and Charles Moyer were accused of complicity in the murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg, the IWW used the case to raise funds and support, and paid for the legal defense. However, even the not guilty verdicts worked against the IWW, because the IWW was deprived of martyrs, and at the same time, a large portion of the public remained convinced of the guilt of the accused.[28] The trials caused a bitter split between Haywood and Moyer. The Haywood trial also provoked a reaction within the WFM against violence and radicalism. In the summer of 1907, the WFM withdrew from the IWW, Vincent St. John left the WFM to spend his time organizing the IWW.

Bill Haywood for a time remained a member of both organizations. His murder trial had made Haywood a celebrity, and he was in demand as a speaker for the WFM. However, his increasingly radical speeches became more at odds with the WFM, and in April 1908, the WFM announced that the union had ended Haywood's role as a union representative. Haywood left the WFM, and devoted all his time to organizing for the IWW.[6]:216–217

Historian Vernon H. Jensen has asserted that the IWW had a "rule or ruin" policy, under which it attempted to wreck local unions which it could not control. From 1908 to 1921, Jensen and others have written, the IWW attempted to win power in WFM locals which had once formed the federation's backbone. When it could not do so, IWW agitators undermined WFM locals, which caused the national union to shed nearly half its membership.[29][30][31][32][33][34][35]

IWW versus the Western Federation of Miners

The Western Federation of Miners left the IWW in 1907, but the IWW wanted the WFM back. The WFM had made up about a third of the IWW membership, and the western miners were tough union men, and good allies in a labor dispute. In 1908, Vincent St. John tried to organize a stealth takeover of the WFM. He wrote to WFM organizer Albert Ryan, encouraging him to find reliable IWW sympathizers at each WFM local, and have them appointed delegates to the annual convention by pretending to share whatever opinions of that local needed to become a delegate. Once at the convention, they could vote in a pro-IWW slate. St. Vincent promised: “… once we can control the officers of the WFM for the IWW, the big bulk of the membership will go with them.” But the takeover did not succeed.[36]

In 1914, Butte, Montana, erupted into a series of riots as miners dissatisfied with the Western Federation of Miners local at Butte formed a new union, and demanded that all miners join the new union, or be subject to beatings or worse. Although the new rival union had no affiliation with the IWW, it was widely seen as IWW-inspired. The leadership of the new union contained many who were members of the IWW, or agreed with the IWW's methods and objectives. However, the new union failed to supplant the WFM, and the ongoing fight between the two factions had the result that the copper mines of Butte, which had long been a union stronghold for the WFM, became open shops, and the mine owners recognized no union from 1914 until 1934.[37]

IWW versus United Mine Workers, Scranton, Pennsylvania, 1916

The IWW clashed with the United Mine Workers union in April 1916, when the IWW picketed the anthracite mines around Scranton, Pennsylvania, intending, by persuasion or force, to keep UMWA members from going to work. The IWW considered the UMWA too reactionary, because the United Mine Workers negotiated contracts with the mine owners for fixed time periods; the IWW considered that contracts hindered their revolutionary goals. In what a contemporary writer pointed out was a complete reversal of their usual policy, UMWA officials called for police to protect United Mine Workers members who wished to cross the picket lines. The Pennsylvania State Police arrived in force, prevented picket line violence, and allowed the UMWA members to peacefully pass through the IWW picket lines.[6][38]

Between 1915 and 1917, the IWW's Agricultural Workers Organization (AWO) organized more than a hundred thousand migratory farm workers throughout the Midwest and western United States,[39] often signing up and organizing members in the field, in rail yards and in hobo jungles. During this time, the IWW member became synonymous with the hobo riding the rails; migratory farmworkers could scarcely afford any other means of transportation to get to the next jobsite. Railroad boxcars, called "side door coaches" by the hobos, were frequently plastered with silent agitators from the IWW.

Building on the success of the AWO, the IWW's Lumber Workers Industrial Union (LWIU) used similar tactics to organize lumberjacks and other timber workers, both in the deep South and the Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada, between 1917 and 1924. The IWW lumber strike of 1917 led to the eight-hour day and vastly improved working conditions in the Pacific Northwest. Even though mid-century historians would give credit to the US Government and "forward thinking lumber magnates" for agreeing to such reforms, an IWW strike forced these concessions.[40]

From 1913 through the mid-1930s, the IWW's Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union (MTWIU), proved a force to be reckoned with and competed with AFL unions for ascendance in the industry. Given the union's commitment to international solidarity, its efforts and success in the field come as no surprise. Local 8 of the Marine Transport Workers was led by Ben Fletcher, who organized predominantly African-American longshoremen on the Philadelphia and Baltimore waterfronts, but other leaders included the Swiss immigrant Walter Nef, Jack Walsh, E.F. Doree, and the Spanish sailor Manuel Rey. The IWW also had a presence among waterfront workers in Boston, New York City, New Orleans, Houston, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Eureka, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver as well as in ports in the Caribbean, Mexico, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and other nations. IWW members played a role in the 1934 San Francisco general strike and the other organizing efforts by rank-and-filers within the International Longshoremen's Association up and down the West Coast.

Wobblies also played a role in the sit-down strikes and other organizing efforts by the United Auto Workers in the 1930s, particularly in Detroit, though they never established a strong union presence there.

Where the IWW did win strikes, such as in Lawrence, they often found it hard to hold onto their gains. The IWW of 1912 disdained collective bargaining agreements and preached instead the need for constant struggle against the boss on the shop floor. It proved difficult, however, to maintain that sort of revolutionary enthusiasm against employers. In Lawrence, the IWW lost nearly all of its membership in the years after the strike, as the employers wore down their employees' resistance and eliminated many of the strongest union supporters. In 1938, the IWW voted to allow contracts with employers,[41] so long as they would not undermine any strike.

Government suppression


Joseph J. Ettor, who had been arrested in 1912, giving a speech to barbers on strike


A newspaper editorial cartoon from 1917, critical of the IWW's antiwar stance during World War I


Anti-socialist cartoon in a railroad-sponsored magazine, 1912

The IWW's efforts were met with "unparalleled" resistance from Federal, state and local governments in America;[7] from company management and labor spies, and from groups of citizens functioning as vigilantes. In 1914, Wobbly Joe Hill (born Joel Hägglund) was accused of murder in Utah and, on what many regarded as flimsy evidence, was executed in 1915.[42][43] On November 5, 1916, at Everett, Washington, a group of deputized businessmen led by Sheriff Donald McRae attacked Wobblies on the steamer Verona, killing at least five union members[44] (six more were never accounted for and probably were lost in Puget Sound). Two members of the police force — one a regular officer and another a deputized citizen from the National Guard Reserve — were killed, probably by "friendly fire".[45] At least five Everett civilians were wounded.[46]

Many IWW members opposed United States participation in World War I. The organization passed a resolution against the war at its convention in November 1916.[47]:241 This echoed the view, expressed at the IWW's founding convention, that war represents struggles among capitalists in which the rich become richer, and the working poor all too often die at the hands of other workers.

An IWW newspaper, the Industrial Worker, wrote just before the U.S. declaration of war: "Capitalists of America, we will fight against you, not for you! There is not a power in the world that can make the working class fight if they refuse." Yet when a declaration of war was passed by the U.S. Congress in April 1917, the IWW's general secretary-treasurer Bill Haywood became determined that the organization should adopt a low profile in order to avoid perceived threats to its existence. The printing of anti-war stickers was discontinued, stockpiles of existing anti-war documents were put into storage, and anti-war propagandizing ceased as official union policy. After much debate on the General Executive Board, with Haywood advocating a low profile and GEB member Frank Little championing continued agitation, Ralph Chaplin brokered a compromise agreement. A statement was issued that denounced the war, but IWW members were advised to channel their opposition through the legal mechanisms of conscription. They were advised to register for the draft, marking their claims for exemption "IWW, opposed to war."[47]:242–244

In spite of the IWW moderating its vocal opposition, the IWW's antiwar stance made it highly unpopular. Frank Little, the IWW's most outspoken war opponent, was lynched in Butte, Montana, in August 1917, just four months after war had been declared.


Cover of The Evolution of Industrial Democracy by Abner E. Woodruff, initialed by illustrator Ralph Hosea Chaplin, published by IWW. Notably stamped as evidence used in a trial.

During World War I the U.S. government moved strongly against the IWW. On September 5, 1917, U.S. Department of Justice agents made simultaneous raids on dozens of IWW meeting halls across the country.[30]:406 Minutes books, correspondence, mailing lists, and publications were seized, with the U.S. Department of Justice removing five tons of material from the IWW's General Office in Chicago alone.[30]:406 This seized material was scoured for possible violations of the Espionage Act of 1917 and other laws, with a view to future prosecution of the organization's leaders, organizers, and key activists.

Based in large measure on the documents seized September 5, one hundred and sixty-six IWW leaders were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in Chicago for conspiring to hinder the draft, encourage desertion, and intimidate others in connection with labor disputes, under the new Espionage Act.[30]:407 One hundred and one went on trial en masse before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1918. Their lawyer was George Vanderveer of Seattle.[48] They were all convicted — including those who had not been members of the union for years — and given prison terms of up to twenty years. Sentenced to prison by Judge Landis and released on bail, Haywood fled to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic where he remained until his death.

In 1917, during an incident known as the Tulsa Outrage, a group of black-robed Knights of Liberty tarred and feathered seventeen members of the IWW in Oklahoma. The attack was cited as revenge for the Green Corn Rebellion, a preemptive attack caused by fear of an impending attack on the oil fields and as punishment for not supporting the war effort. The IWW members had been turned over to the Knights of Liberty by local authorities after they were beaten, arrested at their headquarters and convicted of the crime of vagrancy. Five other men who testified in defense of the Wobblies were also fined by the court and subjected to the same torture and humiliations at the hands of the Knights of Liberty.[49][50][51][52][53]

In 1919, an Armistice Day parade by the American Legion in Centralia, Washington, turned into a fight between legionnaires and IWW members in which four legionnaires and a Centralia deputy sheriff were shot dead. Which side initiated the violence of the Centralia massacre is disputed. A number of IWWs were arrested, one of whom, Wesley Everest, was lynched by a mob that night.[54]

Members of the IWW were prosecuted under various State and federal laws and the 1920 Palmer Raids singled out the foreign-born members of the organization.

Organizational schism and afterwards

IWW quickly recovered from the setbacks of 1919 and 1920, with membership peaking in 1923 (58,300 estimated by dues paid per capita, though membership was likely much higher as the union tolerated delinquent members).[55] But recurring internal debates, especially between those who sought either to centralize or decentralize the organization, ultimately brought about the IWW's 1924 schism.[56]

At the beginning of the 1949 Smith Act trials, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was disappointed when prosecutors indicted fewer CPUSA members than he had hoped, and – recalling the arrests and convictions of over one hundred IWW leaders in 1917 – complained to the Justice Department, stating, "the IWW was crushed and never revived, similar action at this time would have been as effective against the Communist Party."

Activity after World War II

1950–2000

Taft–Hartley Act


An injury to one is an injury to all.

After the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1946 by Congress, which called for the removal of Communist union leadership, the IWW experienced a loss of membership as differences of opinion occurred over how to respond to the challenge. In 1949, US Attorney General Tom C. Clark[57] placed the IWW on the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations[58] in the category of "organizations seeking to change the government by unconstitutional means" under Executive Order 9835, which offered no means of appeal, and which excluded all IWW members from Federal employment and federally subsidized housing programs (this order was revoked by Executive Order 10450 in 1953).

At this time, the Cleveland local of the Metal and Machinery Workers Industrial Union (MMWIU) was the strongest IWW branch in the United States. Leading figures such as Frank Cedervall, who had helped build the branch up for over ten years, were concerned about the possibility of raiding from AFL-CIO unions if the IWW had its legal status as a union revoked. In 1950, Cedervall led the 1500-member MMWIU national organization to split from the IWW, as the Lumber Workers Industrial Union had almost thirty years earlier. Unfortunately for the MMWIU, this act would not save it. Despite its brief affiliation with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, it would face serious raiding from AFL and CIO and would be defunct by the late 1950s, less than ten years after separating from the IWW.[59]

The loss of the MMWIU, at the time the IWW's largest industrial union, was almost a deathblow to the IWW. The union's membership fell to its lowest level in the 1950s during the Second Red Scare, and by 1955, the union's fiftieth anniversary, it was near extinction, though it still appeared on government lists of Communist-led groups.[60]

1960s rejuvenation

The 1960s civil rights movement, anti-war protests, and various university student movements brought new life to the IWW, albeit with many fewer new members than the great organizing drives of the early part of the 20th century.

The first signs of new life for the IWW in the 1960s would be organizing efforts among students in San Francisco and Berkeley, which were hotbeds of student radicalism at the time. This targeting of students would result in a Bay Area branch of the union with over a hundred members in 1964, almost as many as the union's total membership in 1961. Wobblies old and new would unite for one more "free speech fight": Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. Riding on this high, the decision in 1967 to allow college and university students to join the Education Workers Industrial Union (IU 620) as full members spurred campaigns in 1968 at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.[61]:13 The IWW would send representatives to Students for a Democratic Society conventions in 1967, 1968, and 1969, and as the SDS collapsed into infighting, the IWW would gain members who were fleeing this discord. These changes would have a profound effect on the union, which by 1972 would have sixty-seven percent of members under the age of thirty, with a total of nearly five hundred members.[61]:14

The IWW's links to the 60s counterculture led to organizing campaigns at counterculture businesses, as well as a wave of over two dozen co-ops affiliating with the IWW under its Wobbly Shop model in the 1960s to 1980s. These businesses were primarily in printing, publishing, and food distribution; from underground newspapers and radical print shops to community co-op grocery stores. Some of the printing and publishing industry co-ops and job shops included Black & Red (Detroit), Glad Day Press (New York),[61]:17 RPM Press (Michigan),[61]:17 New Media Graphics (Ohio),[61]:17 Babylon Print (Wisconsin),[61]:17 Hill Press (Illinois),[61]:17 Lakeside (Madison, Wisconsin), Harbinger (Columbia, South Carolina), Eastown Printing in Grand Rapids, Michigan (where the IWW negotiated a contract in 1978),[61]:17 and La Presse Populaire (Montréal). This close affiliation with radical publishers and printing houses sometimes led to legal difficulties for the union, such as when La Presse Populaire was shut down in 1970 by provincial police for publishing pro-FLQ materials, which were banned at the time under an official censorship law. Also in 1970, the San Diego, California, "street journal" El Barrio became an official IWW shop. In 1971 its office was attacked by an organization calling itself the Minutemen, and IWW member Ricardo Gonzalves was indicted for criminal syndicalism along with two members of the Brown Berets.[60]

These ties to anti-authoritarian and radical artistic and literary currents would link the IWW even more heavily to the 60s counterculture, exemplified by the publication in Chicago in the 1960s of Rebel Worker by the surrealists Franklin and Penelope Rosemont. One edition was published in London with Charles Radcliffe, who went on to become involved with the Situationist International. By the 1980s, the Rebel Worker was being published as an official organ again, from the IWW's headquarters in Chicago, and the New York area was publishing a newsletter as well.

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Part 2 of 3

Return to workplace campaigns

Invigorated by the arrival of enthusiastic new members, the IWW began a wave of organizing drives. These largely took a regional form and they, as well as the union's overall membership, concentrated in Portland, Chicago, Ann Arbor, and throughout the state of California, which when combined accounted for over half of union drives from 1970 to 1979. In Portland, Oregon, the IWW led campaigns at Winter Products (a brass plating plant) in 1972, at a local Winchell's Donuts (where a strike was waged and lost), at the Albina Day Care (where key union demands were won, including the firing of the director of the day care), of healthcare workers at West Side School and the Portland Medical Center, and of agricultural workers in 1974. The latter effort led to the opening of an IWW union hall in Portland to compete with extortionate hiring halls and day labor agencies. Organizing efforts led to a growth in membership, but repeated loss of strikes and organizing campaigns would anticipate the decline of the Portland branch after the mid-1970s, a stagnancy period which would last until the 1990s.[61]:15

In California, union activities were based in Santa Cruz, where in 1977 the IWW engaged in one of its most ambitious campaigns of the 1970s: an attempt in 1977 to organize 3,000 workers hired under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) in Santa Cruz County. The campaign led to pay raises, the implementation of a grievance procedure, and medical and dental coverage, but the union failed to maintain its foothold, and in 1982 the CETA program would be replaced by the Job Training Partnership Act.[61]:15–16 The IWW would win some lasting victories in Santa Cruz, however, with successful campaigns at the Janus Alcohol Recovery Center, the Santa Cruz Law Center, Project Hope, and the Santa Cruz Community Switchboard.[61]:16


Memorial service

Elsewhere in California, the IWW was active in Long Beach in 1972, where it organized workers at International Wood Products and Park International Corporation (a manufacturer of plastic swimming pool filters) and went on strike after the firing of one worker for union-related activities.[62] Finally, in San Francisco, the IWW ran campaigns for radio station and food service workers.[61]:15–16

In Chicago, the IWW was an early opponent of so-called urban renewal programs, and supported the creation of the "Chicago People's Park" in 1969. The Chicago branch also ran citywide campaigns for healthcare, food service, entertainment, construction, and metal workers, and its success with the latter led to an attempt to revive the national Metal and Machinery Workers Industrial Union, which twenty years earlier had been a major component of the union. Metalworker organizing would largely end in 1978 after a failed strike at Mid-American Metal in Virden, Illinois. The IWW also became one of the first unions to try to organize fast food workers, with an organizing campaign at a local McDonald's in 1973.[61]:16

The IWW also built on its existing presence in Ann Arbor, which had existed since student organizing began at the University of Michigan, to launch an organizing campaign at the University Cellar, a college bookstore. The union won National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certification there in 1979 following a strike, and the store would become a strong job shop for the union until it was closed in 1986. The union launched a similar campaign at another local bookstore, Charing Cross Books, but was unable to maintain its foothold there despite reaching a settlement with management.[61]:17

In the late 1970s, the IWW came to regional prominence in entertainment industry organizing, with an Entertainment Workers Organizing Committee being founded in Chicago in 1976, followed by campaigns organizing musicians in Cleveland in 1977 and Ann Arbor in 1978. The Chicago committee published a model contract which was distributed to musicians in the hopes of raising industry standards, as well as maintaining an active phone line for booking information. IWW musicians such as Utah Phillips, Faith Petric, Bob Bovee, and Jim Ringer also toured and promoted the union,[61]:17 and in 1987 an anthology album, Rebel Voices, was released.

Other IWW organizing campaigns of the 1970s included a ShopRite supermarket in Milwaukee, at Coronet Foods in Wheeling, West Virginia, chemical and fast food workers (including KFC and Roy Rogers) in State College, Pennsylvania, and hospital workers in Boston, all in 1973; shipyards in Houston, Texas, and restaurant workers in Pittsburgh in 1974; unsuccessful campaigns at the Prospect Nursing Home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a Pizza Hut in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, in 1975; and a construction workers organizing drive in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1978.[61]:18

1990s

In the 1990s, the IWW was involved in many labor struggles and free speech fights, including Redwood Summer, and the picketing of the Neptune Jade in the port of Oakland in late 1997.

In 1996, the IWW launched an organizing drive against Borders Books in Philadelphia. In March, the union lost an NLRB certification vote by a narrow margin but continued to organize. In June, IWW member Miriam Fried was fired on trumped-up charges and a national boycott of Borders was launched in response. IWW members picketed at Borders stores nationwide, including Ann Arbor; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Miami; Chicago; Palo Alto; Portland, OR; Portland, ME; Boston; Philadelphia; Albany; Richmond; St. Louis; Los Angeles; and other cities. This was followed up with a National Day of Action in 1997, where Borders stores were again picketed nationwide, and a second organizing campaign in London, England.[63]

Also in 1996, the IWW began organizing at Wherehouse Music in El Cerrito, California. The campaign continued until 1997, when management fired two organizers and laid off over half the employees, as well as reducing the hours of known union members. This directly affected the NLRB certification vote which followed, where the IWW lost over 2:1.[63]

A group of seven people stand near the entrance of a building.


Three IWW General Secretary-Treasurers: Mark Kaufman, Jeff Ditz, and Fred Chase, at a funeral for a friend.

In 1998, the IWW chartered a San Francisco branch of the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union (MTWIU), which trained hundreds of waterfront workers in health and safety techniques and attempted to institutionalize these safety practices on the San Francisco waterfront.[64]

In 1999, the IWW chartered a local branch of the Education Workers Industrial Union in Boston, Massachusetts, which started to organize workers at local colleges and universities.

Additionally, IWW organizing drives in the late 90s included a strike at the Lincoln Park Mini Mart in Seattle in 1996, Keystone Job Corps, the community organization ACORN, various homeless and youth centers in Portland, Oregon, sex industry workers, and recycling shops in Berkeley, California. IWW members were also active in the building trades, shipyards, high tech industries, hotels and restaurants, public interest organizations, railroads, bike messengers, and lumber yards.

The IWW stepped in several times to help the rank and file in mainstream unions, including saw mill workers in Fort Bragg in California in 1989, concession stand workers in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1990s, and shipyards along the Mississippi River.

2000–2010


Members in good standing (legal records)

In the early 2000s, the IWW organized Stonemountain and Daughter Fabrics, a fabric shop in Berkeley, California. The shop continues to remain an IWW organized shop.

The city of Berkeley's recycling is picked up, sorted, processed and sent out all through two different IWW-organized enterprises.

In 2003, the IWW began organizing street people and other non-traditional occupations with the formation of the Ottawa Panhandlers Union. A year later, the Panhandlers Union led a strike by the homeless. Negotiations with the city resulted in the city government promising to fund a newspaper written and sold by the homeless.

Between 2003 and 2006, the IWW organized unions at food co-operatives in Seattle, Washington and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The IWW represents administrative and maintenance workers under contract in Seattle, while the union in Pittsburgh lost 22–21 in an NLRB election, only to have the results invalidated in late 2006, based on management's behavior before the election.

In 2004, an IWW union was organized in a New York City Starbucks. In 2006, the IWW continued efforts at Starbucks by organizing several Chicago area shops.[67][68]

In Chicago the IWW began an effort to organize bicycle messengers with some success.

In September 2004, IWW-organized short haul truck drivers in Stockton, California walked off their jobs and went on a strike. Nearly all demands were met. Despite early victories in Stockton, the truck driver union ceased to exist in mid-2005.

In New York City, the IWW has been organizing immigrant foodstuffs workers since 2005. That summer, workers from Handyfat Trading joined the IWW, and were soon followed by workers from four more warehouses.[69] Workers at these warehouses made gains such as receiving the minimum wage and being paid overtime.

In 2006, the IWW moved its headquarters to Cincinnati, Ohio, and in 2010, headquarters was moved back to Chicago, Illinois.

Also in 2006, the IWW Bay Area Branch organized the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas. The Union has been negotiating for a contract and hopes to gain one through workplace democracy and organizing directly and taking action when necessary.


IWW flags at a 2007 rally in Seattle.

The Wobblies are back. Many young radicals find the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) the most congenial available platform on which to stand in trying to change the world.

— Staughton Lynd, 2014.[70]

In May 2007, the NYC warehouse workers came together with the Starbucks Workers Union to form The Food and Allied Workers Union IU 460/640. In the summer of 2007, the IWW organized workers at two new warehouses: Flaum Appetizing, a Kosher food distributor, and Wild Edibles, a seafood company. Over the course of 2007–08, workers at both shops were illegally terminated for their union activity. In 2008, the workers at Wild Edibles actively fought to get their jobs back and to secure overtime pay owed to them by the boss. In a workplace justice campaign called Focus on the Food Chain, carried out jointly with Brandworkers International, the IWW workers won settlements against employers including Pur Pac, Flaum Appetizing and Wild Edibles.[71][72][73][74]

Besides IWW's traditional practice of organizing industrially, the Union has been open to new methods such as organizing geographically: for instance, seeking to organize retail workers in a certain business district, as in Philadelphia.

The union has also participated in such worker-related issues as protesting involvement in the war in Iraq, opposing sweatshops and supporting a boycott of Coca-Cola for that company's support of the suppression of workers rights in Colombia.

On July 5, 2008, the Grand Rapids, Michigan, Starbucks Workers Union and CNT-AIT in Seville, Spain, organized a global day of action against alleged Starbucks union busting, in particular the firing of two union members in Grand Rapids and Seville. According to the Grand Rapids Starbucks Workers Union website,[75] pickets were held in several dozen cities in more than a dozen countries.


IWW in Washington D.C.

The Portland, Oregon General Membership Branch is one of the largest and most active branches of the IWW currently. The branch holds three contracts currently, two with Janus Youth Programs and one with Portland Women's Crisis Line.[76] There has been some debate within the branch about whether or not union contracts such as this are desirable in the long run, with some members favoring solidarity unionism as opposed to contract unionism and some members believing there is room for both strategies for organizing. The branch has successfully supported workers wrongfully fired from several different workplaces in the last two years. Due to picketing by Wobblies, these workers have received significant compensation from their former employers. Branch membership has been increasing, as has shop organizing. As of 2005, the 100th anniversary of its founding, the IWW had around 5,000 members, compared to 13 million members in the AFL-CIO.[77] Other IWW branches are located in Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Uganda and the United Kingdom.

2011 Wisconsin General Strike
In early 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker announced a budget bill which the IWW held would effectively outlaw unions for state or municipal workers. In response, there was an emergency meeting of the Midwestern IWW member organizations. The participants decided that organizing a general strike was an absolute priority. IWW members presented a proposal at a meeting of South-Central Federation of Labor (SCFL) which would endorse a general strike and create an ad-hoc Committee to instruct affiliated locals in preparations for the general strike. The IWW proposal passed nearly unanimously. The Madison branch made an international appeal translating various materials concerning the strike into Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Additionally, an appeal was made to European unions (CNT – Spain, CGT – Spain and CGT – France) to send organizers to Madison who could present their experience of general strikes at union meetings and help organize the strike in other ways. The CNT (France) sent letters of solidarity to the IWW. This was considered the largest and most successful intervention in a working-class struggle that the IWW has undertaken since the 1930s.[78] In the aftermath, the strike was said by some to be 'The General Strike that didn't happen' because eventually ongoing efforts at industrial action were "completely overwhelmed by the recall effort" against the governor during the crisis.[79]

Since 2012

In 2012, the IWW moved its General Headquarters offices to 2036 West Montrose, Chicago.[13]

The IWW waged an organizing campaign at Chicago-Lake Liquors in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2013. The store, which advertises itself as the highest-volume liquor store in Minnesota, had a wage cap of $10.50 per hour, but in the face of IWW demands for the wage cap to be lifted, store management fired five organizers. On April 6, the Twin Cities branch of the union responded with a picket around the store informing customers of the situation. This was followed by a second picket on May 4, a day which customarily had heavy business at the store. The union claimed to have made "what should have been an extremely busy Saturday into a quiet afternoon inside the store".[80] After several months, the National Labor Relations Board announced that it found merit in the union's unfair dismissal complaint.[81] As a result, the union and store management agreed to a $32,000 settlement as a form of compensation to the fired workers and the campaign officially ended.

Workers at the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School in Holyoke, Massachusetts were organized with the IWW in 2015, hoping to address the "authoritarian leadership" of the school administration and perceived racial bias in hiring.[82]

On 14 September 2015, after a year long organizing campaign, workers at Sound Stage Production in North Haven Connecticut declared their membership in the IWW.[83] Within a week they were threatened with legal action and fired. After several months of negotiation through the National Labor Relations Board, a settlement was reached and the workers agreed to back pay and severance compensation. As part of the campaign, the workers formed the Production Services Collective and continue as a workers cooperative and organizing with IWW-CT.

The IWW announced the Burgerville Workers Union (BVWU) in April 2016, which focuses on workers at the Oregon regional fast food chain, Burgerville. A subsidiary of the IWW, the BVWU went public on April 26 at a rally of workers and supporters outside a Portland, Oregon Burgerville location. Upon going public, the BVWU was endorsed by a number of local Oregon community organizations, including union locals, the Portland Solidarity Network, and food and racial justice organizations.[84] It was also endorsed by then-Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). The union received pushback with a letter from Burgerville's CEO, Jeff Harvey, being distributed to workers discouraging them from joining the union.[85] In June 2017, Burgerville paid a settlement of $10,000 after an investigation by the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, which found that the company had violated state-mandated break periods for workers.[86] In April and May 2018 the IWW won NLRB elections in 2 Burgerville Locations.

In August 2016, workers at Ellen's Stardust Diner in Manhattan formed Stardust Family United (SFU) under the IWW, driven by the firing of thirty employees, as well as an unpopular new scheduling system.[87] After going public, the union accused Stardust management of retaliatory firings and posting anti-union materials in the restaurant.[88]

On 9 September 2016, the 45th anniversary of the Attica Prison Riots, 900[89] incarcerated workers organized by the IWW and many other prisoners participated in the 9/9 National Prison Strike declared by the IWW's Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. Supported by a number of anti-incarceration and prisoners' organizations such as the Free Alabama Movement, the strike focused on the poor conditions in many American prisons and the low rates of prisoner pay for maintaining prisons and engaging in commercial production of goods for third-party companies.[90] The strike affected an estimated twenty[91] prisons in eleven states and had its epicenter at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama.[91] Estimates of the number of inmates affected range from 20,000,[91] to 50,000,[92] to as high as 72,000,[93] with David Fathi of the ACLU National Prison Project judging it to be the "largest prisoner strike in recent memory".[91] Initial media coverage was slow, with strike organizers complaining of a "mainstream-media blackout", which could be attributed to the difficulty in communicating with prisoners, as many prisons went on lockdown either in response to prisoner strike activity or in anticipation of it.[89]

Outside the US

Australia

Australia encountered the IWW tradition early. In part this was due to the local De Leonist Socialist Labor Party following the industrial turn of the US SLP. The SLP formed an IWW Club in Sydney in October 1907. Members of other socialist groups also joined it, and the special relationship with the SLP soon proved to be a problem. The 1908 split between the Chicago and Detroit factions in the United States was echoed by internal unrest in the Australian IWW from late 1908, resulting in the formation of a pro-Chicago local in Adelaide in May 1911 and another in Sydney six months later. By mid-1913 the "Chicago" IWW was flourishing and the SLP-associated pro-Detroit IWW Club in decline.[94] In 1916 the "Detroit" IWW in Australia followed the lead of the US body and renamed itself the Workers' International Industrial Union.[95]

The early Australian IWW used a number of tactics from the US, including free speech fights. However, there early appeared significant differences of practice between the Australian IWW and its US parent; the Australian IWW tended to co-operate where possible with existing unions rather than forming its own, and in contrast with the US body took an extremely open and forthright stand against involvement in World War One. The IWW cooperated with many other unions, encouraging industrial unionism and militancy. In particular, the IWW's strategies had a large effect on the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union. The AMIEU established closed shops and workers councils and effectively regulated management behaviour toward the end of the 1910s.


Australian anti-conscription poster, 1916

The IWW was well known for opposing the First World War from 1914 onwards, and in many ways was at the front of the anti-conscription fight. A narrow majority of Australians voted against conscription in a very bitter hard-fought referendum in October 1916, and then again in December 1917, Australia being the only belligerent in World War One without conscription. In very significant part this was due to the agitation of the IWW, a group which probably never had as many as 500 members in Australia at its peak. The IWW founded the Anti-Conscription League (ACL) in which members worked with the broader labour and peace movement, and also carried on an aggressive propaganda campaign in its own name; leading to the imprisonment of Tom Barker (1887–1970) the editor of the IWW paper Direct Action, sentenced to twelve months in March 1916. A series of arson attacks on commercial properties in Sydney was widely attributed to the IWW campaign to have Tom Barker released. He was indeed released in August 1916, but twelve mostly prominent IWW activists, the so-called Sydney Twelve were arrested in NSW in September 1916 for arson and other offences. (Their trial and eventual imprisonment would become a cause célèbre of the Australian labour movement on the basis that there was no convincing evidence that any of them had been involved in the arson attacks.) A number of other scandals were associated with the IWW, a five-pound note forgery scandal, the so-called Tottenham tragedy in which the murder of a police officer was blamed on the IWW, and above all it was blamed for the defeat of the October 1916 conscription referendum. In December 1916 the Commonwealth government led by Labour Party renegade Billy Hughes declared the IWW an illegal organization under the Unlawful Associations Act. Eighty six members immediately defied the law and were sentenced to six months imprisonment. Direct Action was suppressed, its circulation was at its peak of something over 12,000.[96] During the war over 100 members Australia-wide were sentenced to imprisonment on political charges,[97] including the veteran activist Monty Miller.

The IWW continued illegally operating with the aim of freeing its class war prisoners and briefly fused with two other radical tendencies – from the old Socialist parties and Trades Halls – to form a larval communist party at the suggestion of the militant revolutionist and Council Communist Adela Pankhurst. The IWW, however, left the CPA shortly after its formation.

By the early 1930s, most Australian IWW branches had dispersed as the Communist Party grew in influence.[98]


IWW members picket in Sydney, June 1981

The Australian IWW has grown since the 1940s, but due to the nature of the Australian industrial relations system, it is unlikely to win union representation in any workplaces in the immediate future. More significant is its continuing place in the mythology of the militant end of the Australian labour movement.[99] As an extreme example of the integration of ex-IWW militants into the mainstream labour movement one might instance the career of Donald Grant, one of the Sydney Twelve sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for conspiracy to commit arson and other crimes. Released from prison in August 1920 he would soon break with the IWW over its anti-political stand, standing for the NSW Parliament for the Industrial Socialist Labour Party unsuccessfully in 1922 and then in 1925 for the mainstream Australian Labor Party (ALP) also unsuccessfully. However, this reconciliation with the ALP and the electoral system did not prevent him being imprisoned again in 1927 for street demonstrations supporting Sacco and Vanzetti. He would eventually represent the ALP in the NSW Legislative Council in 1931–1940 and the Australian Senate 1943–1956.[100] No other member of the Australian IWW actually entered Parliament but Grant's career is emblematic in the sense that the ex-IWW militants by and large remained in the broader labour movement, bringing some greater or lesser part of their heritage with them.

"Bump Me Into Parliament"[101] is the most notable Australian IWW song, and is still current. It was written by ship's fireman William "Bill" Casey, later Secretary of the Seaman's Union in Queensland.[96]

New Zealand

Australian influence was strong in early 20th century left-wing groups, and several founders of the New Zealand Labour Party (e.g. Bob Semple) were from Australia. The trans-Tasman interchange was two-way, particularly for miners. Several Tasmanian Labour "groupings" in the 1890s cited their earlier New Zealand experience of activism e.g. later premier Robert Cosgrove, and also Chris Watson from New South Wales.[102]

"Wobbly" activists in New Zealand pre-WWI were John Benjamin King and H. M. Fitzgerald (an adherent of the De Leon school) from Canada. Another was Robert Rivers La Monte from America, who was (briefly) an organiser for the New Zealand Socialist Party (as was Fitzgerald). IWW strongholds were Auckland "a city with the demographic characteristics of a frontier town"; Wellington where a branch survived briefly and in mining towns, on the wharves and among labourers.[103]

Canada

The IWW was active in Canada from a very early point in the organization's history, especially in Western Canada, primarily in British Columbia. The union was active in organizing large swaths of the lumber and mining industry along the coast, in the Interior of BC, and Vancouver Island. Joe Hill wrote the song "Where the Fraser River Flows" during this period when the IWW was organizing in British Columbia. Some members of the IWW had relatively close links with the Socialist Party of Canada.[104] Canadians who went to Australia and New Zealand before WWI included John Benjamin King and H. M. Fitzgerald (an adherent of the De Leon school).[103]

Arthur "Slim" Evans, organizer in the Relief Camp Workers' Union and the On-to-Ottawa Trek of 1935 was once a Wobbly, although during the On-to-Ottawa Trek he was with the One Big Union. He was also a friend of another well-known Canadian, Ginger Goodwin, who was shot in Cumberland, British Columbia by a Dominion Police constable when he was resisting the First World War. The impact of Ginger Goodwin influenced various left and progressive groups in Canada, including a progressive group of MPs in the House of Commons called the Ginger Group.

Despite the IWW being banned as a subversive organization in Canada during the First World War, the organization rebounded swiftly after being unbanned after the war, reaching a post-WWI high of 5600 Canadian members in 1923.[105] The union entered a short "golden age" in Canada with an official Canadian Administration located at the Finnish Labour Temple in Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay, Ontario) and a strong base among immigrant labourers in Northern Ontario and Manitoba, especially Finns, which included harvest workers, lumberjacks, and miners. During this period, the IWW would compete for members with a number of other radical and socialist organizations such as the Finnish Organization of Canada (FOC), with the IWW's Industrialisti newspaper competing with the FOC's Vapaus for attention and readership. During this period. Membership slowly decreased during the 1920s and 30s despite continued organizing and strike activity as the IWW lost ground to the One Big Union and Communist Party-controlled organizations such as the Workers' Unity League (WUL). Despite this competition, the IWW and WUL cooperated during strikes, such as at the Abitibi Pulp & Paper Company near Sault Ste. Marie in 1933, where the Finnish workers in the IWW and WUL faced discrimination and violence from the Anglo citizens of the town. The IWW also successfully unionized Ritchie's Dairy in Toronto and formed a fishery workers' branch in MacDiarmid (now Greenstone, Ontario).[106]

In 1936, the IWW in Canada supported the Spanish Revolution and began to recruit for the militia of the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), in direct conflict with Communist Party recruiters for the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, a conflict which resulted in a number of violent clashes at recruitment rallies in Northern Ontario. Several Canadian IWW members were killed in the Spanish Civil War and the CNT's ensuing defeat at the hands of both Fascist and Stalinist forces.[106] By the middle of the Second World War, IWW membership had dropped to 500, but had rebounded to 2000 by 1946. After this, the IWW entered a long period of decline, with the Canadian Administration slowly shrinking back to its traditional strongholds in Port Arthur and Vancouver, and becoming more of a social club and mutual aid society of mostly Finnish members in Port Arthur and the co-operative businesses they controlled. An Education Workers Industrial Union branch was established at the University of Waterloo in 1968, but failed to achieve success and dissolved. As well, in 1970 La Presse Populaire du Montréal, an IWW-run print shop, was shut down under the War Measures Act due to its support for the FLQ during the October Crisis. As a sign of the times, the old Canadian Administration in Port Arthur was dissolved in 1973 and replaced by a Canadian Regional Organizing Committee, meaning that Canadian branches would be administrated by the General Administration in the United States. IWW activity in Canada began to shift largely toward strike support and labour activism, such as support for the Artistic Woodwork strike in Toronto in 1974. By the 80s, the Vancouver branch was supporting unemployed activism through the Vancouver Unemployed Action Centre by helping to shut down the scam operation Vancouver Job Mart and supporting the campaign for a fixed-income transit pass.

By the end of the 1990s, the IWW in Canada was following the general pattern of ascendancy, winning government recognition at Harvest Collective in Manitoba, the first shop certified in Canada since 1919. During the 2000s, branches were chartered in several new cities, and existing branches were revitalized. The dissolved Canadian Regional Organizing Committee was refounded in 2011.

In 2009, after Starbucks established policies that would mean demotions and loss of salary for some workers, the Quebec branches of Montreal and Sherbrooke helped found the Starbucks Workers' Union (STTS) which made a breakthrough in Quebec City at an establishment in Sainte-Foy.[107] Leaders Simon Gosselin, Dominic Dupont and Andrew Fletcher were harassed in the months following unionization, and union efforts were defeated by law firm Heenan Blaike in the series of hearings before Quebec Labor Relations Board.[108] Following this episode and judging that the place of a wobblie is on the floor of his workplace and not in a court room, the local decided, once and for all, to abandon the consultation syndicalism of the Commission of labor relations to put forward a para-legal practice with solidarity syndicalism and direct action. This decision was confirmed at the 2011 IWW International Convention where the representatives agreed that no union affiliated with the IWW could sign a contract questioning its right to strike.[109] The result of those tactics provided very good results and Starbucks management backed up on their new policies even though the union process was officially over.

Today the IWW remains active in the country with branches in Vancouver, Vancouver Island, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa/Outaouais, Toronto, Windsor, Sherbrooke, Québec City and Montréal.[110] In August 2009, Canadian members voted to ratify the constitution of the Canadian Regional Organizing Committee (CanROC) to improve inter-branch coordination and communication. Affiliated branches are Winnipeg, Ottawa-Outaouais, Toronto, Windsor, Sherbrooke, Montréal and Québec City. Each branch elects a representative to make decisions on the Canadian board. There were originally three officers, the Secretary-Treasurer, Organizing Department Liaison, and Editor of the Canadian Organizing Bulletin.[111] In 2016, CanROC members voted to split the Secretary-Treasurer role into separate Regional Secretary and Regional Treasurer positions.

There are currently five job shops in Canada: Libra Knowledge and Information Services Co-op in Toronto, ParIT Workers Cooperative in Winnipeg, the Windsor Button Collective, the Ottawa Panhandlers' Union and the Street Labourers of Windsor (SLOW). The Ottawa Panhandlers' Union continues a tradition in the IWW of expanding the definition of worker. The union members include anyone who makes their living in the street, including buskers, street vendors, the homeless, scrappers and panhandlers. In the summer of 2004, the Union led strike by the Homeless (the Homeless Action Strike) in Ottawa. The strike resulted in the city agreeing to fund a newspaper created and sold by the Homeless on the street. On May 1, 2006, the Union took over the Elgin Street Police Station for a day. A similar IWW organization, the Street Labourers of Windsor (SLOW), has garnered local,[112] provincial,[113] and national[114] news coverage for its organizing efforts in 2015.

Recently, the IWW has also engaged in campaigns among harm reduction workers (resulting in the Toronto Harm Reduction Workers Union in 2014) and workers at the Québec fast food chain Frite Alors! in 2016.

Montreal

The largest Canadian General Membership Branch of the IWW is located in Montréal, Québec, where it officially operates under the name of Syndicat Industriel des Travailleurs et Travailleuses de Montréal (IWW-SITT).[115]

Media

Between 2015 - 2017, the IWW-SITT hosted a radio program titled Action en Direct (Direct Action) which was broadcast from Radio Centre-Ville 102.3FM[116] before moving to CHOQ radio at the Université du Québec à Montréal and being placed on hiatus.

Union Locals

The IWW-SITT maintains several active union locals in Montreal, including a freelancers union (Syndicat Associatif des Travailleurs-euses Autonome du Québec),[117][118] and a union for employees of student union, and student-union owned enterprises (Les travailleurs et les travailleuses des milieux associatifs en éducation).[119][120]

Europe

Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria

The IWW started to organise in Germany following the First World War. Fritz Wolffheim played a significant role in establishing the IWW in Hamburg. A German Language Membership Regional Organizing Committee (GLAMROC) was founded in December 2006 in Cologne. It encompasses the German-language area of Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, and Switzerland with branches or contacts in 16 cities.[121] In 2015, the GLAMROC is reported as having 200 members in good standing[122]

Wales, Ireland, Scotland, England

The regional body of the union in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland is the Wales, Ireland, Scotland, England Regional Administration (WISERA). Formerly known as the Britain and Ireland Regional Administration (BIRA), its name was changed as a result of a referendum vote by WISERA members.[123]

Early history

The British Advocates of Industrial Unionism, founded in 1906, supported the IWW. This group split in 1908, with the majority supporting Daniel De Leon and a minority supporting E. J. B. Allen founding the Industrialist Union and developing links with the Chicago-based IWW. Allen's group soon disappeared, but the first IWW group in Britain was founded by members of the Industrial Syndicalist Education League led by Guy Bowman in 1913.

The IWW was present to varying extents in many of the struggles in the early decades of the 20th century, including the UK General Strike of 1926, and the dockers' strike of 1947. A Neath Wobbly who had been active in Mexico trained volunteers who went to the International Brigade to fight against Franco but did not return.

During the decade after World War II, the IWW had two active branches in London and Glasgow. These soon died off, before a modest resurgence in northwest England during the 1970s.

Membership


IWW membership numbers in WISE from 2006-2018

Between 2001 and 2003, there was a marked increase in UK membership, with the creation of the Hull General Membership Branch. During this time the Hull branch had 27 members of good standing, being at that time the largest branch outside of the United States. By 2005, there were around 100 members in the United Kingdom. For the IWW's centenary, a stone was laid (51°41'598N 4°17.135W Geocacher), in a public access forest in Wales, commemorating the centenary of the union. As well, Sequoias were planted as a memorial to US IWW and Earth First! activist Judi Bari. 2006 saw the IWW formally registered by the UK government as a recognised trade union.

The IWW currently has a presence in several major urban areas as well as regional centres, with chartered branches in London, Glasgow (Clydeside GMB), Bradford, Bristol, Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Reading, Sheffield, in the Tyne and Wear and West Midlands areas, and most recently in Wales.

Overall, membership has increased rapidly; in 2014, the union reported a total UK membership of 750,[124] which increased to 1000 by April 2015.[125] In 2016, the 1,500 member limit was passed

Campaigns

IWW members were involved in the Liverpool dockers' strike that took place between 1995 and 1998, and numerous other events and struggles throughout the 1990s and 2000s, including the successful unionising of several workplaces, such as support workers for the Scottish Socialist Party.

Recently, the IWW has focused its efforts on health and education workers, publishing a national industrial newsletter for health workers and a specific bulletin for workers in the National Blood Service. In 2007 it launched a campaign alongside the anti-capitalist group No Sweat which attempted to replicate some of the successes of the US IWW's organising drives amongst Starbucks workers. In the same year its health-workers' network launched a national campaign against cuts in the National Blood Service, which is ongoing.

Also in 2007, IWW branches in Glasgow and Dumfries were a key driving force in a successful campaign to prevent the closure of one of Glasgow University's campuses, (The Crichton) in Dumfries.[126] The campaign united IWW members, other unions, students and the local community to build a powerful coalition. Its success, coupled with the National Blood Service campaign, has raised the IWW's profile significantly since then.

In 2011, the IWW representing cleaners at the Guildhall won back-pay and the right to collective negotiation with their employers, Ocean. Also in 2011, branches of the IWW were set up in Lincoln, Manchester and Sheffield (notably workers employed by Pizza Hut).

The Edinburgh General Membership Branch of the IWW along with other branches of the IWW's Scottish section voted in 2014 to become a signatory to the "From Yes to Action Statement" produced by the Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh. In 2015, along with similar groups such as the Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty and Edinburgh Anarchist Federation, they joined the Scottish Action Against Austerity network.[127]

In 2016, WISERA promoted a campaign targeting couriers working for companies such as Deliveroo.[128]

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Part 3 of 3

Elsewhere in Europe

An Iceland Regional Organizing Committee (IceROC) was chartered in 2015. The union has become a trailblazer in supporting sex workers in Iceland, who lack access to services which do not automatically treat them as victims of abuse.[129] In particular, the IWW in Iceland has taken a strong position against the Swedish model of policing sex work, where sex workers are not criminalized but their customers are, and instead has argued in favour of "organizing all workers without moral or legal judgement".[130]

Also in 2015, a Greek Regional Organizing Committee (GreROC) was chartered. In July of that year, it released a statement condemning the Greek government's response to the results of the 2015 Greek bailout referendum, saying that "despite the Left tone of dignity that the Left governmental administrators use, this is a one-way blackmail. We need a radical change of shift, not in words but in action."[131]

Africa

South Africa

Main article: Industrial Workers of the World (South Africa)

The IWW has a rich and complex history in South Africa, with an original South African IWW organization being founded in 1910 and existing through most of the 1910s until disintegrating by around 1916.[132] The union's insistence on multiracial unionism set it at odds with the white trade union movement and brought severe political repression from the apartheid-era South African government. The major South African port of Durban was an important link in the IWW's international network which was largely maintained by its Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union, that connected the mainline North American IWW to ports in Africa, India, South America, and Australasia.

After the collapse of the formal IWW organization in South Africa, it would be succeeded by an Industrial Socialist League, the Industrial Workers of Africa, and finally the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU), which would become the major black union in South Africa in the 1920s and 30s. Nevertheless, IWW and syndicalist influences would decline as the black workers' movement was brought into the trade union fold and came under the domination of the Communist Party of South Africa, which opposed syndicalist tendencies in the unions.[133]

Almost a hundred years later, multiple attempts were made to rebuild the South African IWW, with a short-lived South African Regional Organising Committee being founded in the early 2000s in Durban and attempts made to build a branch in Cape Town in the early 2010s, with neither resulting in success.[134]

Elsewhere in Africa

In 1997, there was a total of 3,240[135] workers in Sierra Leone, mostly miners, who registered themselves as IWW members in Sierra Leone government records largely independently of the international General Administration in Chicago (i.e. without the official issuing of membership cards or taking of dues). Contact between the Sierra Leone members and General Headquarters was lost after a military coup which was an episode in the Sierra Leone Civil War, which would last until 2002. The intensification of the civil war caused a number of IWW members, including the only official union delegate in the country, to flee to Guinea.[136][63]

In 2012, IWW members in Uganda formed a Ugandan Regional Organizing Committee (ROC) and began to raise funds to establish a Ugandan office for the IWW. However, it was discovered that the union officers in Uganda had been violating the Constitution of the IWW in multiple ways, such as by permitting employers to join the union, and the ROC was dissolved.[137]

Folk music and protest songs


Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent: The "Little Red Songbook"

One Wobbly characteristic since their inception has been a penchant for song. To counteract management sending in the Salvation Army band to cover up the Wobbly speakers, Joe Hill wrote parodies of Christian hymns so that union members could sing along with the Salvation Army band, but with their own purposes. For example, "In the Sweet By and By" became "There'll Be Pie in the Sky When You Die (That's a Lie)". From that start in exigency, Wobbly song writing became common because they "articulated the frustrations, hostilities, and humor of the homeless and the dispossessed."[138] The IWW collected its official songs in the Little Red Songbook and continues to update this book to the present time. In the 1960s, the American folk music revival in the United States brought a renewed interest in the songs of Joe Hill and other Wobblies, and seminal folk revival figures such as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie had a pro-Wobbly tone, while some were members of the IWW. Among the protest songs in the book are "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" (this song was never popular among members), "Union Maid", and "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night". Perhaps the best known IWW song is "Solidarity Forever". The songs have been performed by dozens of artists, and Utah Phillips performed the songs in concert and on recordings for decades. Other prominent IWW songwriters include Ralph Chaplin who authored "Solidarity Forever", and Leslie Fish.

The Finnish IWW community produced several folk singers, poets and songwriters, the most famous being Matti Valentine Huhta (better known as T-Bone Slim), who penned "The Popular Wobbly" and "The Mysteries of a Hobo's Life". Slim's poem, "The Lumberjack's Prayer" was recorded by Studs Terkel on labor singer Bucky Halker's Don't Want Your Millions. Hiski Salomaa, whose songs were composed entirely in Finnish (and Finglish), remains a widely recognized early folk musician in his native Finland as well as in sections of the Midwest United States, Northern Ontario, and other areas of North America with high concentrations of Finns. Salomaa, who was a tailor by trade, has been referred to as the Finnish Woody Guthrie. Arthur Kylander, who worked as a lumberjack, is a lesser known, but important Finnish IWW folk musician. Kylander's lyrics range from the difficulties of the immigrant labourer's experience to more humorous themes. Arguably, the wanderer, a recurring theme in Finnish folklore dating back to pre-Christian oral tradition (as with Lemminkäinen in the Kalevala), translated quite easily to the music of Huhta, Salomaa, and Kylander; each of whom have songs about the trials and tribulations of the hobo.

In literature

Much of the plot of the U.S.A. trilogy, a series of three novels by American writer John Dos Passos - comprising the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936) - is devoted to the IWW, and several of the more sympathetic characters are its members. Written at the time when Dos Passos was politically on the Left, the novels reflect the author's sympathy, at the time of writing, for the IWW and his outrage at its suppression, for which he expresses his deep grudge for President Woodrow Wilson.

Lingo

Wobbly lingo is a collection of technical language, jargon, and historic slang used by the Wobblies, for more than a century. Many Wobbly terms derive from or are coextensive with hobo expressions used through the 1940s.[139][140] The origin of the name "Wobbly" itself is uncertain.[14][141][142] For several decades, many hobos in the United States were members of, or were sympathetic to, the IWW. Because of this, some of the terms describe the life of a hobo such as "riding the rails", living in "jungles", dodging the "bulls". The IWW's efforts to organize all trades allowed the lingo to expand to include terms relating to mining camps, timber work, and farming.[143][144]

Some words and phrases believed to have originated within Wobbly lingo have gained cultural significance outside of the IWW. For example, from Joe Hill's song "The Preacher and the Slave", the expression pie in the sky has passed into common usage, referring to a "preposterously optimistic goal".[145]

Notable members

See also: Category:Industrial Workers of the World members.

Members of the Industrial Workers of the World have included:

• Roger Nash Baldwin, ACLU founder
• Judi Bari, labor and environmental organizer
• Harry Bridges (briefly, later helped form ILWU)
• James P. Cannon
• Lee J. Carter
• Ralph Chaplin
• Noam Chomsky
• James Connolly
• Carlos Cortez, graphic artist
• Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker
• Daniel De Leon
• Eugene V. Debs
• David Dellinger
• Sam Dolgoff
• Vincent R. Dunne
• Joseph Ettor
• Anne Feeney, folk musician
• Ben Fletcher
• Ricardo Flores Magón
• Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
• William Z. Foster
• Otis Gibbs, folk musician
• Arturo Giovannitti
• Lala Hardayal, Indian Nationalist
• Big Bill Haywood
• Howie Hawkins
• Ammon Hennacy, Catholic Worker
• Lesbia Harford, Australian poet
• Joe Hill
• Harry Hooton, Australian poet
• Mary Harris "Mother" Jones
• Andy Irvine, folk musician
• Rosie Kane, former Member of the Scottish Parliament
• Helen Keller[146]
• Jim Larkin
• Carolyn Leckie, former Member of the Scottish Parliament
• Frank Little
• Paul Mattick
• Harry McClintock, folk musician
• Kevin McCoy, artist
• Monty Miller
• Tom Morello
• Eugene O'Neill
• Floyd B. Olson, Minnesota Governor[147]
• Lucy Parsons
• Fredy Perlman
• Faith Petric, folk musician
• Utah Phillips, folk musician
• John Reed, journalist
• Kenneth Rexroth, counterculture icon
• Franklin Rosemont, Surrealist
• David Rovics, folk musician
• Hiski Salomaa, Finnish folk music singer
• Gary Snyder, Buddhist beat poet
• Jim Thompson, crime writer
• Dave Van Ronk, folk musician
• Fritz Wolffheim

Former lieutenant governor of Colorado David C. Coates was a labor militant, and was present at the founding convention,[47]:242–78 although it is unknown if he became a member. It has long been rumored, but not yet proven, that baseball legend Honus Wagner was also a Wobbly. Senator Joe McCarthy accused Edward R. Murrow of having been an IWW member, which Murrow denied.[148] Some of the organization's most famous current members include Noam Chomsky, Tom Morello, mixed martial arts fighter Jeff Monson, and anthropologist David Graeber.

See also

• Organized Labour portal
• Anarchism portal
• Communism portal
• Socialism portal
• 1933 Yakima Valley strike
• Bérmunkás
• Centralia massacre
• Eugene V. Debs
• History of the Industrial Workers of the World
• Industrial democracy
• Industrial Workers of the World philosophy and tactics
• Labor federation competition in the United States
• List of Industrial Workers of the World unions
• One Big Union (concept)
• Seattle General Strike
• Solidarity unionism
• Syndicalism

Notes

1. 3,845 (2019, USA) [3], 1,730 (2018, UK & Ireland), 200 (2015, German-language area), 100 (2019, Australia)

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146. Helen Keller (January 16, 1916). "Why I Became an IWW". Marxists.org. Retrieved August 20,2009.
147. Radicalism in the States: The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the American Political Economy, Richard M. Valelly, 1989, p. 100.
148. "Response to Senator Joe McCarthy on CBS' See It Now". Retrieved February 9, 2016.

Further reading

Archives

• Industrial Workers of the World Archives. Archives contain over 40 archival collections spanning 1903–1996, containing the records of the International Union, several local branches, and numerous personal papers including those of Joe Hill, William Trautmann, and Matilda Robbins. Located at the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs.
• Documents, Essays and Analysis for a History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Online archive at the Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved April 16, 2005.
• Industrial Workers of the World Records, 1906–1944, undated. Approximately .05 cubic feet of textual materials, 1 microfilm cassette (negative). At the Labor Archives of Washington State, University of Washington Libraries Special Collections.
o Industrial Workers of the World Photograph Collection. Circa 1910s-1940s. 121 Photographs (2 boxes); varying sizes.
o John Leonard Miller Papers. 1923–1986. circa 3.75 cubic feet plus 2 sound cassettes.
o Eugene Barnett Oral History Collection. 1940–1961. .21 cubic feet (1 box), 3 sound cassettes (154 min.), 1 transcript (24 pages).
o Pacific Northwest Labor History Association Records. 1971–1995. 1.83 cubic feet (3 boxes).
• IWW Publications and Ephemera at Newberry Library

Official documents

• The Founding Convention of the IWW—Proceedings. New York: Merit Publishers. 1969. p. 616. Library of Congress Catalog Number 70-85538.
• Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, Held at Chicago, Illinois, September 17 to October 3, 1906. Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World, 1906.
• Proceedings of the Tenth Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, Held at Chicago, Illinois, Nov. 20 to Dec. 1, 1916. Chicago: Industrial Workers of the World, 1917.
• With Drops of Blood the History of the Industrial Workers of the World Has Been Written. n.c. [Chicago]: Industrial Workers of the World, n.d. [1919].
• Raids! Raids!! Raids!!! n.c. [Chicago]: Industrial Workers of the World, n.d. [Dec. 1919].

Books

• Bennett, James (2004). Rats and Revolutionaries:The Labour Movement in Australia and New Zealand 1890-1940. Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago Press. ISBN 978-1-877276-49-1.
• Brissenden, Ph.D., Paul Frederick (1920). "The I.W.W.: A Study of American Syndicalism". 83 (193) (2 ed.). Columbia University.
• Buhle, Paul, ed. (2005). Wobblies: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World. Nicole Schulman. Verso. ISBN 978-1-84467-525-8.
• Chester, Eric Thomas (2014). The Wobblies in Their Heyday: The Rise and Destruction of the Industrial Workers of the World during the World War I Era. Praeger Publishers. ISBN 978-1440833014.
• Cole, Peter (2007). Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia. University of Illinois Press. p. 256. ISBN 978-0-252-03186-1.
• Cole, Peter; Struthers, David; Zimmer, Kenyon, eds. (2017). Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW. Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0745399591.
• Dubofsky, Melvyn. We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World. [1969] First paperbound edition. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Books, 1973.
• Duda, John, ed. (2009). Wanted! Men to Fill the Jails of Spokane: Fighting for Free Speech with the Hobo Agitators of the Industrial Workers of the World. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. ISBN 978-0-88286-270-5.
• Flank, Lenny (2007). IWW: A Documentary History. St. Petersburg, Florida: Red and Black Publishers.
• Green, Archie (1993). Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes. University of Illinois Press. p. 534. ISBN 978-0-252-01963-0. Archived from the original on September 5, 2006.
• Green, Archie, ed. (2007). The Big Red Songbook. David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Salerno. Charles H. Kerr. p. 538. ISBN 978-0-88286-277-4.
• Higbie, Frank Tobias (2003). Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880–1930. University of Illinois Press. p. 280. ISBN 978-0-252-07098-3.
• Kornbluh, Joyce L., ed. (1988) [1964]. Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Charles H. Kerr with new introduction and essays ed.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 419, illustrated. ISBN 978-0-88286-237-8.
• McClelland, John, Jr. (1987). Wobbly War: The Centralia Story. Washington State Historical Society.
• Moran, William (2002). Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove. St. Martin's Press. p. 320.
• Ness, Immanuel (2014). New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism. PM Press. ISBN 978-1604869569.
• Rosemont, Franklin, ed. (2005). Dancin' in the Streets: Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists and Provos in the 1960s as Recorded in the Pages of Rebel Worker and Heatwave. Charles Radcliffe. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. ISBN 978-0-88286-301-6.
• Rosen, Ellen Doree (2004). A Wobbly Life: IWW Organizer E. F. Doree. Introduction by Melvyn Dubofsky. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press. p. 256. ISBN 978-0-8143-3203-0.
• St. John, Vincent (1917). The I.W.W.: Its History, Structure & Methods. I.W.W. Publishing Bureau. Archived from the original on August 7, 2007.
• Thompson, Fred (1955). The I.W.W.: Its First Fifty Years. Chicago: IWW.
• Thornton, Steve (2013). A Shoeleather History of the Wobblies: Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Connecticut. The Shoeleather History Project. p. 150. ISBN 978-0989822404.
• Tyler, Robert (1967). Rebels of the Woods: The I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Press.

Documentary films

• The Wobblies. Directed by Stewart Bird, Deborah Shaffer, 1979. DVD 2006 NTSC English 90 minutes. (Includes interviews with 19 elderly Wobblies)
• An Injury to One. A film by Travis Wilkerson, 2003 First Run Icarus Films. English 53 minutes. Chronicles the 1917 unsolved murder of Wobbly organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana, during a strike by 16,000 miners against the Anaconda Copper Company. The film connects "corporate domination to government repression, local repression to national repression, labor history to environmental history, popular culture to the history of class struggle", according to one review. (Yoshie Furuhashi (August 2005). "Peter Rachleff, "An Injury to One: A Film by Travis Wilkerson"". Mrzine.monthlyreview.org. Retrieved August 20, 2009.)

External links

• Media from Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations from Wikiquote
• Texts from Wikisource
• Data from Wikidata
• Official website
• International Directory of regional and local branches
• Brief History/Timeline 1905–1920 of the IWW
• IWW Strikes, Campaigns, Arrests 1906–1920 (maps)
• IWW Local Unions 1906–1917 (maps)
• IWW Newspapers 1906–1946 (maps)
• IWW Starbucks Workers Union
• IWW Jimmy John's Workers Union
• IWW Sisters' Camelot Canvassers Union
• NYC IWW Newsletter
• Jim Crutchfield's IWW Page current and historical documents
• Paul Buhle, "The Legacy of the IWW", Monthly Review
• Staughton Lynd, "The Wobblies in Their Heyday, a Hard-headed History of the IWW", Monthly Review Magazine
• Songs of the workers to fan the flames of discontent The famous "little red songbook" 32nd ed. April 1968
• Songs of the Wobblies: 1954 LP
• Strikes! Labor History Encyclopedia for the Pacific Northwest, a collection of resources on IWW activity in the region, including their role in the 1919 Seattle General Strike and farm worker organizing in the early 1900s.
• Interview with British Wobblies, autrefutur.net, 2013.
• My Whole Foods nightmare: How a full-time job there left me in poverty. Nick Rahaim, Salon.com, December 8, 2014.
• Why a D.C. bike shop is joining a radical socialist union. The Washington Post. March 5, 2015.
• The radical IWW – "Wobblies" – gaining strength in Oklahoma after an absence of nearly a century. Red Dirt Report, April 3, 2015.
• Rattling the Bars: Industrial Workers of the World Against Prison Slavery. The Real News. May 14, 2017.

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Andrew Harvey (religious writer)
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/18/20


Andrew Harvey
Born: 1952 (age 67–68), Coimbatore, India
Occupation: Author, religious scholar, mystic
Language: English and French
Citizenship: British
Alma mater: Oxford University
Period: 1970–1977
Website: andrewharvey.net

Andrew Harvey (born 1952) is a British author, religious scholar and teacher of mystic traditions, known primarily for his popular nonfiction books on spiritual or mystical themes, beginning with his 1983 A Journey in Ladakh. He is the author of over 30 books, including, The Hope, A Guide to Sacred Activism, The Direct Path, the critically acclaimed Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi, The Return of the Mother and Son of Man.[1][2] He was the subject of the 1993 BBC documentary "The Making of a Modern Mystic"[3] and is the founder of the Sacred Activism movement.[4]

Harvey lives in a rural area of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas, where he continues to write when he is not lecturing. Harvey conducts workshops on Sacred Activism, the teachings of Rumi, yoga and practices that will lead to deeper spiritual awareness. Harvey travels with students to sacred sites in India, Australia and South Africa, and offers personal spiritual direction. Harvey was listed as number 33 in the Watkins' Mind Body Spirit magazine as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People in 2012.[5] In 2012, he was nominated for the Templeton Prize, which was eventually awarded to the Dalai Lama.

Early life and education

Harvey was born in Coimbatore, India in 1952[6] and lived there until he was nine years old. He was educated at English boarding schools and then Oxford University, where he later taught Shakespeare and French literature until 1977. He wrote his dissertation on madness in Shakespeare and Erasmus.[7]

Career

At 21 in the early 1970s, Harvey became a fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford.[8] By 1977 he had become disillusioned with life at Oxford and returned to his native India, where a series of mystical experiences initiated his spiritual journey. Over the next thirty years he plunged into different mystical traditions to learn their secrets and practices. In 1978 he met a succession of Indian saints and sages and began his study and practice of Hinduism. In 1983, in Ladakh, he met a Tibetan adept, Thuksey Rinpoche,[9] and undertook with him the Mahayana Buddhist bodhisattva vows; later, in 1990, he would collaborate with Sogyal Rinpoche and Patrick Gaffney in the writing of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.[10] In 1984, Harvey began a ten-year-long exploration and explication of Rumi and Sufi mysticism in Paris with a group of French Sufis under the guidance of Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, the translator of Rumi into French.[11] In 1992, he met Father Bede Griffiths in his ashram in south India near where Harvey had been born. It was this meeting that helped him synthesize the whole of his mystical explorations and reconcile Eastern with Western mysticism.

While in India, Harvey encountered Mother Meera, who became his guru and the subject of his book Hidden Journey.[12] His memoir, The Sun at Midnight, describes their subsequent break and his disillusionment with gurus.

For the last 30 years, Harvey has travelled widely, living in India, London, Paris, New York and San Francisco, studying, teaching at university level and in seminars and workshops. A prolific writer, Harvey has authored or co-authored over 30 books. His focus since 2005 has been the advocacy of what he terms "Sacred Activism". He is the founder and director of the Institute of Sacred Activism, which trains leaders and social justice advocates.[13]

Teachings

Harvey is a scholar of mystic traditions. He envisions true spirituality to be the divinisation of earthly life through spiritual practice. These practices can take many forms and can be taken from religious traditions. Harvey sees six poets and religious figures as having universal appeal:

• Buddha as portrayed in the Dhammapada
• Jesus as portrayed in the Gospel of Thomas
• Rumi, a 13th century Sufi poet.
• Kabir, a 15th century Indian poet
• Ramakrishna, a 19th century Hindu sadhu
• Aurobindo, a 20th century Hindu philosopher-sage

Harvey also emphasises the Divine Feminine, as expressed in the Virgin Mary, Kali, the Black Madonna and Mother Earth.

Since 2005, Andrew Harvey's work has focused on teaching Sacred Activism around the globe. Harvey describes sacred activism as "the product of the union of a profound spiritual and mystical knowledge, understanding, and compassion, peace and energy, with focused, wise, radical action in the world."[14]

Bibliography

• Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening, 1991[15]
• The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying: A New Spiritual Classic from One of the Foremost Interpreters of Tibetan Buddhism to the West (co-editor), 1992[16]
• The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi. North Atlantic Books/Frog, 1994.[17]
• The Divine Feminine: Exploring the Feminine Face of God Throughout the World, 1996 ISBN 1-57324-035-4[18]
• Light upon light: inspirations from Rumi. North Atlantic Books, 1996. ISBN 1-55643-206-2[19]
• Mary's Vineyard: Daily Meditations, Readings, and Revelations. with Eryk Hanut. Quest Books, 1996. ISBN 0835607453[20]
• The Essential Mystics: The Soul's Journey Into Truth. Castle Books, 1998[21]
• The Essential Gay Mystics, 1998 ISBN 0-06-250905-5 (cloth), ISBN 0-06-251524-1[22]
• Son of Man: The Mystical Path to Christ, J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998[23]
• Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, with Eryk Hanut. Quest Books, 1999. ISBN 0-8356-0767-4[24]
• The Return of the Mother, 2000[25]
• A Journey in Ladakh: Encounters with Buddhism, 2000. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000. ISBN 0-618-05675-0[26]
• The Direct Path: Creating a Personal Journey to the Divine Through the World's Traditions, 2001 ISBN 0-7679-0299-8[27]
• The Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night, 2002 ISBN 1-58542-179-0[28]
• A Walk With Four Spiritual Guides: Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, And Ramakrishna. SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2005. ISBN 1594731381[29]
• The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism, Hay House, 2009. ISBN 1-4019-2003-9[30]
• Heart Yoga: The Sacred Marriage of Yoga and Mysticism, North Atlantic Books. 2010. ISBN 9781556438974[31]
• Radical passion : sacred love and wisdom in action. North Atlantic Books. 2012. ISBN 9781583945032[32]

References

1. Author Biography Hay House.
2. O'Reilly, Jane (11 August 1991). "Soul Searching". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 April 2010.
3. The Making of a Modern Mystic (1993), retrieved 18 December 2019
4. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (2009). The hope : a guide to sacred activism (1st ed.). Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House. ISBN 978-1-4019-2003-6. OCLC 262892403.
5. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 14 June 2013. Retrieved 6 March 2012.
6. "Conscious TV - Andrew Harvey – The Death and the Birth". conscious.tv. Retrieved 18 December2019.
7. Harvey, Andrew (3 October 1993). "The Merry Mystic". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 16 March 2020.
8. Andrew Harvey Random House.
9. http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?titl ... y_Rinpoche
10. Rolston, Dean. "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying". Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Retrieved 18 December 2019.
11. Harvey, Andrew (30 September 2010). The Direct Path. London. p. 23. ISBN 978-1-4090-0388-5. OCLC 1100655877.
12. Shawn, Author (19 August 2016). "Mother Meera". SpiritualTeachers.org. Retrieved 18 December2019.
13. "Home". Andrewharvey. Retrieved 18 December 2019.
14. "Sacred Activism". Andrewharvey. Retrieved 18 December 2019.
15. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (1991). Hidden journey : a spiritual awakening (1st ed.). New York: Holt. ISBN 0-8050-1454-3. OCLC 22278056.
16. Sogyal, Rinpoche. (1992). The Tibetan book of living and dying. Gaffney, Patrick, 1949-, Harvey, Andrew, 1952-. [San Francisco, Calif.]: Harper San Francisco. ISBN 0-06-250793-1. OCLC 25552286.
17. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (2001). The way of passion : a celebration of Rumi. Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Maulana, 1207-1273. (1st Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam ed.). New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam. ISBN 1-58542-074-3. OCLC 44573434.
18. The divine feminine : exploring the feminine face of God throughout the world. Harvey, Andrew, 1952-, Baring, Anne, 1931-. Berkeley, CA: Conari Press. 1996. ISBN 1-57324-035-4. OCLC 34151580.
19. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (1996). Light upon light : inspirations from Rumi. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books. ISBN 1-55643-206-2. OCLC 33983720.
20. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (1997), Mary's vineyard, Quest Audio, ISBN 0-8356-2009-3, OCLC 39665695
21. The essential mystics : the soul's journey into truth. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (1st ed.). [San Francisco]: HarperSanFrancisco. 1996. ISBN 0-06-250904-7. OCLC 34742352.
22. The essential gay mystics. Harvey, Andrew, 1952-. Edison, N.J.: Castle Books. 1997. ISBN 0-7858-0907-4. OCLC 39865383.
23. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (1999). Son of Man : the mystical path to Christ (1st trade pbk. ed.). New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam. ISBN 0-87477-992-8. OCLC 40954120.
24. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (1999). Perfume of the desert : inspirations from Sufi wisdom. Hanut, Eryk, 1967- (1st Quest ed.). Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books. ISBN 0-8356-0767-4. OCLC 39810984.
25. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (2001). The return of the mother. New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam. ISBN 1-58542-073-5. OCLC 44613074.
26. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (2000). A journey in Ladakh (1st Mariner Books ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-05675-0. OCLC 43978270.
27. Harvey, Andrew (30 September 2010). The Direct Path. London. ISBN 978-1-4090-0388-5. OCLC 1100655877.
28. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (2002). Sun at midnight : a memoir of the dark night. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam. ISBN 1-58542-179-0. OCLC 49719105.
29. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (2003). A walk with four spiritual guides : Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, and Ramakrishna. Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Pub. ISBN 1-893361-73-X. OCLC 51177404.
30. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (2009). The hope : a guide to sacred activism (1st ed.). Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House. ISBN 978-1-4019-2003-6. OCLC 262892403.
31. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (2010). Heart yoga : the sacred marriage of yoga and mysticism. Erickson, Karuna. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-55643-897-4. OCLC 430839021.
32. Harvey, Andrew, 1952- (2012). Radical passion : sacred love and wisdom in action. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-58394-503-2. OCLC 775415649.

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Tibetan Buddhism and Mass Monasticism
by Melvyn C. Goldstein1
[1In Adeline Herrou and Gisele Krauskopff (eds.), Des moines et des moniales dans le monde. La vie monastique dans le miroir de la parenté. Presses Universitaires de Toulouse le Mirail]
2010

Introduction

Monasticism is fundamental to both Mahayana and Theravada Buddhist philosophies and is present wherever Buddhism existed. Tibet was no exception and possessed a monastic establishment that adhered to the basic Buddhist ideological and vinaya norms. At the same time, however, Tibetan monasticism differed markedly from other forms of Buddhist monasticism in its utilization of a philosophy that I have called “mass monasticism”—an emphasis on recruiting and sustaining very large numbers of celibate monks for their entire lives.2 This essay will examine Tibetan monasticism and the institution of mass monasticism as it existed in the modern era (before socialist institutions replaced them in 1959).3

Monasticism in Tibet

Political systems have ideologies that summarize and rationalize their basic premises. In Tibet, the modern state headed by the Dalai Lama and his Gelug ("yellow hat") sect was founded in 1642 after decades of bitter sectarian conflict with a rival (Kargyu) sect. The new polity was based on a value system in which religious goals and activities were paramount. Not only was the ruler, the 5th Dalai Lama (and after him succeeding Dalai Lamas), considered an actual incarnation of the Bodhisattva Avaloketisvara, but monks served alongside laymen as officials and jointly administered the country. In addition, beginning in the 18th century, regents who ruled during the Dalai Lamas’ minority also came to be chosen from the ranks of the incarnate lamas Because of this, Tibetans conceived of their polity as one in which “religion and politics/government were joined together.”4

A prime goal of the Dalai Lama’s new theocratic government was to support and enhance Buddhism, particularly of its own Yellow Hat sect. Fostering Buddhism was seen as a key measure of Tibet’s worth, and as late as 1946, the Tibetan government conveyed this poignantly in a diplomatic a letter it sent to the Chinese government: “There are many great nations on this earth who have achieved unprecedented wealth and might, but there is only one nation which is dedicated to the well-being of humanity in the world [through its practice of monk conducted Buddhist prayer rituals] and that is the religious land of Tibet which cherishes a joint spiritual and temporal system.”5

This religiosity was measured by the number of celibate monks and monasteries, that is to say, by the numbers of males who had renounced having wives and families to join monastic communities and thereby take the first step on a long journey toward spiritual development and enlightenment. There was, therefore, a strong value given to creating as many monks as possible.6 Every male who became a monk was a victory for Buddhism and a reaffirmation of Tibet’s commitment to exalt religiosity. Tibetans, not surprisingly, not only believed that celibate monkhood per se was superior to secular status, but that all monks, even those we might classify as “marginal” or “bad” monks, were superior to their lay counterparts. Several Tibetan sayings expressed by monks reflect this, for example, one monk said: 'jig rten rab la chos ba'i mtha' skyes (“the worst in the religious life is better than the best in secular life”). And another said: gang zhig gser gyi ri la bsnye 'gyur na/ de yi 'dabs chags thams cad gser la 'gyur. (“whatever comes to lean against a golden mountain will become gold"), meaning that the intrinsic value of monasticism was so great (“gold”) that just the fact of being in a monastery would greatly enhance the male.

The theocratic state in Tibet, consequently, existed not simply to administer its territories for the material welfare of its people or to develop Tibet’s wealth and power vis-à-vis its neighbors, but rather primarily to encourage and facilitate large numbers of males to renounce marriage, family and secular life and accept monastic vows for the salvation of the individual and the glory of Tibetan religiosity. The monastery stood physically and metaphorically as a wall keeping out the immediacy of kinship that imbues secular life in village communities and replacing it with an alternative culture where the immediacy of religious rites and practices dominated social life. Traditional Tibet, in essence, measured its success—its pre-modern GDP if you will—spiritually in terms of the number of monks, monasteries and prayer rituals it produced, not materially in terms of the amount of wool, skins and other products it produced and exported. For the Tibetan religious elite, Tibet’s unique contribution to humanity and the world was its maintenance of an enormous system of monasteries and monks—“mass monasticism.” Monasticism in Tibet, therefore, was not the otherworldly domain of a minute self-selected elite, but a mass phenomenon. Size rather than quality was the ultimate measure of the success of monasticism.

The demography of monasticism

There are no real data on how many monks and monasteries existed in Tibet when the 5th Dalai Lama came to power four hundred years ago in 1642, although his chief minister, Desi Sangye Gyatso, wrote in his history of the Yellow Hat sect (Vaidurya Serpo (Yellow Beryl)) that there were 1,807 monasteries and 97,538 monks (of all sects) in 1694 (including Kham but not Amdo).7 For later periods, the Tibetan exile government has estimated that their were 2,700 monasteries and 115,000 monks in 1951 or about 10-15% of the population and 20-30% of all males.8 This figure must have included many temples (lhakhang) where one or two monks presided as overseers since the average number of monks per monastery otherwise would be only 40 and that is far too few. Chinese government reports also state that surveys conducted in the 1950s revealed more than 2,700 monasteries and temples and 120,000 monks, or about 24% of the male population.9 Although these are obviously just crude guesstimates, they show interesting similarities and generally reveal the extent of mass monasticism in traditional Tibet. By contrast, in Thailand, another prominent Buddhist society, only about 1-2 percent of the total number of males were monks and most of these were not life-long permanent monks.10

Another way to assess at the magnitude of Tibetan monasticism is by looking at its great monastic centers. It is clear that Tibet was the home to the largest monasteries in the world in the modern era and of the many Tibetan monasteries in the 1950s, a number, perhaps as many as 15, were large establishments with over one thousand monks. It is these that Tibetans saw as exemplifying and providing proof of the greatness of the Tibetan monastic system. In and around Tibet’s capital Lhasa, for example, there were three huge Yellow Hat monastic seats—Drepung, Sera, Ganden— that together housed about 20,000 monks. Drepung alone had about 10,000 monks. By contrast, Lhasa, the capital and largest city, had only about 30,000 inhabitants. Major monastic centers also existed in other parts of political Tibet such as Tashilhunpo monastery in Shigatse as well as outside of political Tibet in Qinghai (Kumbum monastery), Gansu (Labrang monastery) and in Kham (Litang, Derge, Batang). Other Tibetan Buddhist sects such as Sakya and Karmpa also had large monasteries, although the focus in this paper is on the dominant Yellow Hat sect.

To create a Buddhist society with a large monastic segment, however, meant there had to be thousands upon thousands of men willing to cut attachments to lay society and family life and adopt lives in an alternative culture—a community of celibate monks each of whom in their eyes stood on his own like a single stick of incense. To facilitate this, Tibet developed effective mechanisms for recruiting large numbers of monks, socializing them into an alternative culture, and retaining them in lives of celibacy.

Monastic recruitment and organization

In Tibet, monks were almost always recruited as very young children through the agency of their parents or guardians. It was considered important to recruit monks before they had experienced sexual relations with girls, so monks were brought to the monastery as young boys, usually between the ages of 6-12. On the other hand, it was not considered important what these boys themselves felt about a lifetime commitment to celibate monasticism and they were basically made monks without regard to their personality, temperament or inclination.

Parents sometimes broached the subject with a son but usually simply told him of their decision. Monastic rules officially required that monks enter of their own volition and the monastery formally asked each entrant whether they wanted to be a monk but this was actually just a token inquiry. For example, if a young monk found the transition to monastic life unpleasant and tried to run away, the monastery did not take this as evidence that the boy did not want to be a monk and therefore let him leave. To the contrary, it invariably sent older monks to search for and forcibly return the runaway child monks. Parents agreed with this view so even if a runaway child monk managed to reach his home, he typically received not sympathy and support but a scolding and the immediate return to the monastery. Interestingly, the process of monastic socialization ultimately worked and all of the many monks who related incidents of running away, in retrospect, did not see this as abusive. Rather, they laughed at how stupid they had been to want to give up being a monk when young. Tibetans traditionally felt that young boys could not comprehend the privilege of being a monk and it was up to their elders to see to it that they had the right opportunities.11 All of this, of course, greatly facilitated the operationalization of mass monasticism.

This system of recruitment through child monks occurred not only in the three great Yellow Hat monastic seats around Lhasa, but also in the thousands of smaller monasteries scattered throughout Tibet proper and the ethnic Tibetan areas of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan.

Recruiting young boys as lifelong monks made sense from the viewpoint of the mass monastic ideology, but posed practical problems in terms of daily life. Tibetan monasteries were not run as communes with monk canteens providing food for all monks. Neither did monks make daily begging trips to secure food. Rather, individual monks were responsible for securing their own foodstuffs and cooking their own meals.12 Consequently, young child monks needed an adult to take care of them, at least until they reached their late teens when they would be able to live independently. The mechanism used to achieve this was to incorporate young monks into what we can think of as monk households (shagtshang), that is to say, young monks moved in with an older monk. These monk households operated much like lay village households in that they had an internal authority hierarchy and combined co-residence and economic cooperation. The older monk who was the head of the monk household was responsible for the economics of the household and for raising the boy—for providing housing, food, discipline, etc. In turn the junior monk was obligated to turn over any income he received from alms or monastery salary to the household head, just as members of lay families turned over any income they earned to their household. And, like lay households, the junior monk worked at whatever the monk household head instructed, e.g., sweeping, fetching water, etc. Lay and monk households, therefore were structurally and functionally similar, the obvious key difference being that monk households were comprised of only males and reproduced themselves not via marriage, sex and reproduction, but by conscious selection of the household head.13

Consequently, Tibetan parents seeking to make a son a monk had to search among friends and relatives to find an older monk who was willing to take in their son and assume responsibility for the boy’s livelihood. In some cases, the older monk would be related to the boy and would likely have met him previously, but in other cases, e.g., if the boy was the child of a friend of a friend, they would have had no prior contact or connection. Thus, although the members of monastic households were sometimes related through kinship, this was not at all necessary.

Moreover, the relationship between the senior and junior monks in a household was not couched in terms of lay kinship terminology nor was kinship terminology used in the monastery between monks.14 Rather, monks in households used the core monastic idiom of “teacher-disciple” in a fictive manner. For example, the younger monk(s) in a monk household all referred to the senior monk as their “teacher” (gegen or gen) and the senior monk would in turn say that he had one or two “disciples (gidru). However, no one in the monastery mistook the “guardian” gegen heading the household for real “teachers” and the official term of reference for them was actually dopderra gegen (lto ster ba’i dge rgan) which translates as “the gegen who gives food.” In contrast, the real teachers were known as beja gegen (dpe cha dge rgan) or “a gegen who teaches religious texts.” Sometimes a single older monk in a monk household played both roles, but usually they were separate.

The duration of monk households varied but usually they lasted until the senior monk died. If there were only two people in the household, normally the younger monk inherited the property and apartment, but if there were more than one, the late household head would have selected one to become the new household head. Often the household by that time would have taken in another young monk so in these cases the household had continuity across generations. Generally, therefore, these monk households stayed together for many decades with mutual sentiments of attachment and affection developing. Ironically, therefore, while the institution of monk households served to allow child monks to sever their attachments to lay society at a young age and be readily incorporated into monastic communities, at the same time it created, to a degree at least, a system that fostered lasting attachments and dependence.

At the same time, the ties of real kinship were not totally severed when boys became monks. Not only, as mentioned above, were some boys placed in monk households with an older relative, but monks maintained loose ties with their families. At some stages of the life cycle of a monk, the families of monks might help to support the monk by sending food to the monk household, whereas at other stages, a successful monk might assist his relatives family, as the following example illustrates.

In this example, an adult monk who had just risen in the monastic hierarchy used his new position to help a poor relative by taking two of her sons into Drepung monastery so as to eliminate two mouths for her to feed. He explained how this occurred:

Just after I became the steward (nangnyer) for the Loseling Chiso [the head manger of the entire monastery]. I heard that my maternal aunt who was [a nomad] living in Damshung had become very poor. So when they asked me to visit them, I took a 15 day home-leave and went. They … wanted to show the others in the community that their nephew was now a powerful official. …

When I arrived, I found that they were extremely poor. They had no sheep or goats of their own and only a few head of livestock on lease. They were so very poor. The father sewed fleece-lined dresses (bagtsa) and the mother dug up droma (wild sweet potatoes) and sold them. They had more children than animals.... I made one of the young boys a new fleece-lined dress and then took him to Lhasa as part of my monk household [in the monastery]. This boy was very clever so I thought it was better not to make him a monk at once. Instead, I sent him to a private school in Lhasa where he would learn to read and write [the cursive script]. Later he could be made a monk and could become a high official in the monastery [from his household] because he would know how to write the cursive script well.15 The next year I told my aunt to send me another of her sons. He wasn’t as clever as the first son so I directly made him a monk in Drepung. I found a poor monk who was living alone and told the poor monk, "Please keep this boy as your disciple. I am the servant of someone [the Chiso] and can’t help much at home now, but every year I will give you 2.5 khe16 of flour and 2.5 khe of barley to help with his subsistence. Later [as you get older], this boy will be a help to you. The poor monk said okay and took him." He agreed to be the gegen [so this boy became part of a household with an unrelated dopderra gegen].17

A separate category of monk households were the great households (labrang) of incarnate lamas. Unlike the households of ordinary monks, these always continued across generations with leadership being passed on by reincarnation succession. In other words, when the incarnate lama who was the head of the labrang died, that lama was believed to reincarnate into an infant who, when discovered a few years later, became the new head/owner of the labrang. Although actual control rested with monk stewards and managers during the new incarnation’s minority, when he became an adult he assumed control.

Parental motives

There were many reasons why parents made a son a monk. As was indicated earlier, making one’s son a monk was culturally valued, even if the boy never became a great religious thinker or practitioner. Just his presence in a monastery would benefit him in this and future lives. It was, therefore, a way of giving a son a prestigious status which required little of the hard manual labor that permeated village life while also, as mentioned earlier, exempting the boy from all corvée obligations to his lord. At the same time it created positive “merit” for the parents. One nomad monk related that in his region making a son a monk was considered equivalent to building a stupa in terms of merit gained.18

A second motivation for enrolling one’s son derived from the divination of lamas or monks. Parents frequently sought divination when their children were ill. Sometimes the remedy prescribed by the practitioner involved propitiating some god who was causing the illness but on other occasions, the prescription called for the parents to promise to later dedicate this boy to religion—to a monastic life. Similarly, in times of sickness, parents sometimes prayed on their own to their protective deity and promised that if he spared their son they would later make him a monk.

A third type of situation occurred when a young boy showed a liking for monks. This type of boy might hang around a monk uncle when he was visiting the family and might cry when his monk relative left asking to go with him. If the uncle encouraged this and urged the family to make the boy his disciple-ward in his monastic household, the family often would agree. In some cases, there were family traditions of uncles and nephews joining a monastery (and monk household) generation after generation.

A fourth, and extremely common, type of situation occurred when parents made a son a monk as part of a strategy for organizing their family’s human resources so as to minimize the likelihood of family fragmentation and land division in the next generation. The basic family in rural Tibet was (and still is) is an extended stem family formed through the mechanism of fraternal polyandry (2 or more brothers jointly taking a bride) or monogamy. Fraternal Polyandry is a functional equivalent of primogeniture in that it seeks to produce only one heir. As there is only one wife per generation and all the brothers are jointly considered the father, all the children of the wife are considered a single heir. In the next generation, the multiple male children will also together marry polyandrously. This type of stem family precludes each of several sons taking his own bride either within the natal family or by setting up new neolocal families.

However, marrying all sons polyandrous is not always possible because of age differences between the brothers. For example, if the eldest of three brothers was 23 and the next brother 17 and the youngest brother only 12 years old (several daughters having been born between the sons), the parents might decide it will be too difficult for the youngest son to become incorporated into the marriage when he matures so will only marry the eldest two sons polyandrously. Because they are seeking to create only one set of heirs per generation, they will not bring a second bride into the household for the youngest son but rather will send him out of the household either by making him a monk or by sending him later as a bridegroom to a family with only daughters. An unintended consequence of this system is an excess of unmarried daughters. Roughly 25% of females age 20-40 do not marry and live separately either as spinsters or single mothers (if they have had affairs and children). 19

Poverty also was very important in motivating parents to make sons monks. Very poor Tibetans with many children had two main mechanisms for balancing their income with subsistence needs. One was making one or more sons a monk as the above mentioned case of the nomad illustrated. Another was to send young sons and daughters as servants to other households. In such cases, the children lived with the other family and were fed by them. Often there was also a small annual salary in grain that went to the parents.

Finally, another very different type of monastic recruitment derived from the right of some monasteries to conscript boys as a corvée tax if the number of their monks fell below a certain limit. This was called tratre (grwa khral) or "monk tax".

Structure and function of a large monastery

Tibet is a large country with important regional differences and four major Buddhist sects each of which had its own monasteries. In addition there is a non-Buddhist sect known as Bon which also had a monastic tradition. Within these traditions there were major large monastic seats as well as many small monasteries located in remote areas. Some of these were completely independent but others were branch monasteries of larger monastic seats such as Drepung, Sera and Ganden. Consequently, it is difficult to generalize about “all” monasteries, although regardless of size and fame, Tibetan monasteries recruited monks as children. However, for the purpose of further illustrating Tibetan “mass monasticism,” the mega-monastery Drepung with its 10,000 monks will be used as an example.

Large monasteries like Drepung were complex institutions that were internally structured like segmentary lineages being divided internally into semi-autonomous sub-monastic units called tratsang of which there were four in Drepung: Gomang, Loseling, Deyang and Ngagpa. Tratsang are normally called “colleges” in the literature due to certain similarities with English universities like Oxford which also were made up of a number of semi-autonomous units. Just as students enrolled in one of Oxford’s colleges, young boys enrolled in one of Drepung’s colleges, although the use of the term college is misleading since tratsang were not schools per se, but rather communities of celibate males who remained there their entire lives.

Drepung monastery as a whole had little control over its four constituent colleges each of which had their own estates, serfs, capital funds, endowments, officials, teaching curriculum, monks and an abbot. On the other hand, the monastery as a whole also had its own estates, capital funds and administrative officials and was headed by a committee of current and ex-abbots (from the various colleges).

Each monastic college, in turn, was internally sub-divided into a number of named semi-autonomous residence units called khamtsen which also had their own resources and officials. Gomang College, for example, had 16 khamtsen in 1959, one of which, Hamdong, alone had about 2,000 monks. New monks were affiliated to khamtsen units based on their natal region so that monks coming from distant areas with non-standard dialects would be housed together with others from their same region.20 Individual monks, therefore, belonged to a khamtsen, which was part of a college, which was part of the overall monastery. Individuals, therefore, had cross-cutting allegiances. Two monks could have the same overall institutional allegiance (Drepung) but different college allegiances, or the same college affiliation but different khamtsen affiliation. Nevertheless, despite this similarity to a segmentary kinship system, no kinship ideology was used, just as none was used in universities like Oxford.

At the level of the individual, Drepung’s ten thousand monks were divided into two broad categories—those who studied a formal curriculum of Buddhist theology and philosophy and those who did not. The former, known as pechawa, were a small minority, amounting to only about 10 percent of the total monk population. These “scholar monks,” pursued a long curriculum that took approximately fifteen years to complete.21 The curriculum in each college used a slightly different set of texts, although in the end they all covered the same material. The scholar monks in Gomang, Loseling, and Deyang met three times a day to practice debating in their respective college’s outdoor walled park called a chöra, or dharma grove. Monks came to Drepung from all over the Tibetan Buddhist world (including Mongolia) to see if they could master the difficult curriculum and obtain the advanced degree of geshe. The intellectual greatness of the Yellow Hat sect’s monastic tradition was measured by the brilliance of these scholar monks.

The overwhelming majority of monks, the so called “common” monks (tramang or tragyü), however, did not pursue this arduous curriculum and were not involved in formal study. Many could not read much more than one or two prayer books, and some, in fact, were functionally illiterate, having memorized only a few basic prayers. These monks had some intermittent monastic work obligations in their early years (as a kind of “new monk tax”), but otherwise were free to do what they liked within the overall framework of monastic (vinaya) rules).

Despite the monastic segment’s commitment to the ideology of mass monasticism, Tibetan monks had to support themselves. In general, their income came from a combination of sources: 1) salary from their monastery/college/khamtsen (which in itself was normally not sufficient to subsist), 2) alms given to individual monks at the time of the prayer assemblies, 3) income from their own labor, and 4. support in food from their natal family. Many monks in Tibet actually spent a considerable amount of time engaged in income-producing activities including crafts like tailoring and medicine, working as servants for other monks, engaging in trade, or even leaving the monastery at peak agricultural times to work for farmers.

This is surprising since mega-monasteries like Drepung were owners of huge estates and serfs. According to 1959 Chinese statistics, 36.8 percent of the total amount of cultivated land in Tibet was held by monasteries and lamas (and another 24% by aristocratic families, and 38.9% by the government itself). Drepung Monastery itself is said to have owned 185 manorial estates, 20,000 serfs, 300 pasture areas and 16,000 nomads each of which had a population of hereditarily bound peasant families who worked the monastery’s (or college’s) land without wages as a corvée obligation.22 Moreover, since there were no banks in Tibet, monasteries like Drepung had huge capital funds which lent out money and grain at high interest. Scores of monks went out yearly to rural Tibet to collect payment of interest and principal at harvest time. The income from these resources and activities could have supported the subsistence of the monks fully had it been allocated predominately for that purpose, but it was not.

Drepung (and its constituent colleges, etc.) instead allocated a substantial portion of their income to support rituals and prayer chanting assemblies. Such prayer ceremonies were formal meetings in huge assembly halls that involved all of the monks belonging to the sponsoring unit (the monastery as a whole, the college or the khamtsen). Thousands of monks sitting in long rows intoning prayers together for the benefit of humanity is an image Tibetans cherished and was considered as one of the most important functions of the monastery. However, these prayer sessions were also expensive since each of the monks attending was served butter-tea during breaks in the chanting. Consequently, sponsoring the prayer assemblies meant providing tea for many thousands of monks daily which required the monastery to use large amounts of butter, tea and firewood. This was one of the monastery’s biggest expenses.

Mega-monasteries like Drepung, of course, could have restricted the number of monks they accepted in order to both fund all its monks adequately and still do the prayer ceremonies. In fact, the Tibetan government at one point had tried to place limits on the number of monks (e.g., Drepung’s limit was set at 7,700), but the monasteries ignored this and allowed all who came to join. In the ideology of mass monasticism, having large numbers of monks took precedence, so how monks financed what they needed in addition to their monistic salary was, by and large, seen as the monks own problem.

The monks most affected by the insufficient funding were those who had made a commitment to study Buddhist theology full-time, that is, the scholar monks. They received no special funds from the monastery and had no time to engage in trade or other income-producing activities because of their heavy study burdens. Consequently, they typically lived solely on their monastery salary and alms and were forced to lead extremely frugal lives unless they were able to find wealthy patrons to supplement their income or were themselves wealthy, as in the case of the incarnate lamas. Tales abound in Drepung of famous scholar monks so poor that they had to eat the staple food—tsamba (parched barley flour)—with water rather than tea, or worse, who had to eat the leftover dough from ritual offerings (torma).

Consequently, in the traditional era, the great monasteries like Drepung, Sera and Ganden were full of very different sorts of monks, some rich, some poor, some devoted to study, some involved in administration and others doing a wide range of labor and trading, and some doing very little and just barely subsisting.

Leaving the monastery

Enrolling young monks without regard to their wishes or personalities meant inevitable problems of adjustment. Monks had the right to leave the monastic order, and as they became young adults in their twenties, had the ability to do so. Consequently, powerful mechanisms were needed to retain most of the young adult monks who were unsure about living a lifetime of celibacy. The monastic system was structured to facilitate this. On the one hand, while monks enjoyed high status, ex-monks were somewhat looked down on. On the other hand, the great large monasteries generally did not place severe restrictions on comportment or demand educational achievement. Rather than diligently weeding out all novices who seemed unsuited for a rigorous life of prayer, study, and meditation, the Tibetan monastic system expelled monks only if they committed murder or engaged in heterosexual intercourse. There were also no exams that novices or monks were required to pass in order to remain in the monastery (although there were required exams for higher intellectual statuses within the monastic ranks). Monks who had no interest in studying or meditating were as welcome as the virtuoso scholar monks. Even totally illiterate monks were accommodated because, in the ideology of mass monasticism, they too had made the critical break from the attachments of secular life. The monks of Drepung conveyed the great diversity of types of monks in their monastery with the pithy saying: “In the ocean there are fishes and frogs.”23

Furthermore, leaving the monastery posed economic problems. Monks lost whatever rights they might otherwise have had to their family’s farm when they entered the monastery, so monks who left the monastery had to find some new source of income. They also reverted to their original serf status when they left so were liable for corvée service to their lord. By contrast, if they remained monks, their basic economic needs were met without having to work too hard. All these factors made it both easier and more advantageous for monks to remain in the monastery.

As mentioned above, the monastic leadership espoused the belief that since the Tibetan state was first and foremost the supporter and patron of religion, the needs and interests of religion should take primacy. And since mass monasticism represented the greatness of Tibetan religion, they believed that the political and economic system existed to facilitate this and that they, not the government, could best judge what was in the short- and long-term interests of religion. Thus, it was their religious duty and right to intervene whenever they felt the government was acting against the interests of religion. This, of course, brought them into the mainstream of political affairs and into potential conflict with the Dalai Lama/regent and the government. And while the Dalai Lama and the rest of the government agreed with mass monasticism in principle, there was often disagreement on specific issues. For example, in 1946 when the government hired an English teacher and opened a modern school in Lhasa to better prepare Tibet to deal with the modern world, the monks in Lhasa perceived this as a threat to the dominance of religion and protested, threatening the students with bodily harm. The government quickly backed down and the school was disbanded after a few weeks.24

The domination of the mass-monastic ideology in traditional Tibet is illustrated vividly by a serious dispute that occurred in Drepung in 1958, the year before the uprising in Lhasa that ended the traditional system.

The Gomang dispute

As indicated earlier, Drepung monks did not have to pass examinations to remain part of the monastic community, and only about 10 percent of the monks were actively engaged in the Buddhist study curriculum leading to the geshe degree. This became a problem for Drepung’s Gomang College when the number of monks annually receiving the geshe degree became so low that it embarrassed the abbot of the college. The Gomang College prayer chant master (umdze) of the time explained,

During the six-year term of each abbot, it was expected that 60 geshes would be produced. But in recent years in Gomang College, only two, three, or four were graduating each year. Because of this, the government asked Drepung why there were so few geshes now whereas in the past there had been so many. When we looked into this, we found…that the number of geshes produced was declining because in general only 100 to 200 of Gomang College’s over 4,000 monks were engaged in active study. So we decided that we had to do something to reverse this trend.25

Part of the reason for this dearth was Drepung’s policy of not providing special financial support for monks engaged in full-time theological studies. As explained earlier, these monks had no time to engage in income-producing work like ordinary monks and faced lives of hardship and poverty unless they had some other source of support.

Nevertheless, there was very little support in the monastery for providing extra income to scholar monks or, alternatively, for forcing all monks to study and pass exams. Most of the monks, particularly the common monks and monk administrators, in fact, felt that the scholar monks were studying for their own benefit, not for the welfare of the monastery, so deserved nothing special. They were not considered better than the “common monks.” Consequently, the Gomang College reformers decided that the best way to proceed was indirectly. They convinced the abbot to make a new rule shifting the site of the monastic salary payments to the dharma grove where the scholar monks debated. The logic behind this move was explained by one of the leaders of the reform faction: “We thought that if we distributed salaries in the dharma grove, more monks would come to it, and if we did this continually, then some of these monks would get used to the dharma grove [and come even when there was no salary distribution and get interested in studying].”

The abbot’s new order meant that all monks, even monk-administrators, had to go to the dharma grove and sit through the prayers that preceded the debating session before collecting their salaries. Although they did not have to study, or participate in the debates, or even attend the dharma grove during the rest of the year, this order produced an outcry of protest from the monk officials who handled the college’s administrative work. At their instigation, the mass of common monks became involved, insisting that the rules of the monastery were sacred and could not be changed.

This controversy polarized Gomang College’s monks and eventually led to violence when a mob of angry monks broke into a meeting on this issue and dragged three of the reform leaders outside where they tied them to pillars, beat them, and then locked them up as prisoners. Ultimately, the Dalai Lama’s government intervened and freed the monks, but while it expelled the leaders of both the pro and anti reform factions, it did not force the monks to go to the dharma grove to collect their salaries. The reform program, therefore, had failed because the fundamental premise of the mass monastic ideology gave equivalence to all monks regardless of their knowledge or spirituality.

In conclusion, therefore, the Tibetan monastic system was a distinctive form of Buddhist monasticism that gave priority to recruiting large numbers of young boys into an alternative monastic culture and society that included a commitment to a lifetime of celibacy. It was an orientation that I have called mass monasticism because its priority was to provide an opportunity for very large numbers of males to become monks, even though many of these would never study religion deeply or engage in serious meditation. As mentioned earlier, about 90% of the monks in the great monastic centers like Drepung were not “scholar monks” actively studying Buddhism philosophy to attain the advanced degree of geshe. However, in the dominant emic perspective, all monks were viewed as having equally made the critical first step in religious progress by cutting their attachments to wife, children, and secular life and becoming part of monastic communities. Monasticism in Tibet, therefore, was not focused on creating a few great scholar monks, but rather on creating the conditions wherein large numbers of boys could have an opportunity to become monks for their entire lives. Some would study and debate at the highest intellectual levels, others would only participate in prayer assemblies where they chanted memorized texts and some would not even do that. But they were all seen as having successfully made the difficult commitment to follow the Buddha’s teaching and leave the secular world behind them.

Until its demise in 1959, this system of mass monasticism was extremely successful, creating and sustaining the largest monasteries in the modern world and the largest proportion of full-time celibate monks.

_______________

Notes:

1 Melvyn C. Goldstein is the John Reynolds Harkness Professor in Anthropology and Co-Director of the Center for Research on Tibet, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A.

2 Goldstein and Kapstein, 1998, p. 15.

3 Tibetan monasticism still exists in Tibet although in an attenuated form due to government limitations on the numbers of monks. For a broad discussion of Buddhism in contemporary Tibet see Goldstein, 1998a and b.

4 In Tibetan, chos srid gnyis ldan or chos srid gnyis 'brel.

5 Goldstein 1989, p. 816.

6 There were, of course, also nuns and nunneries in Tibet, but these were fewer in number and not considered as important.

7 Dunggar 1991, p. 75. Data from a Qing dynasty survey reported in 1733 that there were 3,477 monasteries and 356,230 monks (Dunggar 1991, p. 76) but this seems too high.

8 Goldstein 1998, p. 15. http://www.tibet.org/Activism/Rights/religion.html.

9 Information Office of the State Council. “Tibet’s march toward modernization.” White Paper China Daily , 8 November 2001. At present there are limitation on the number of monasteries and monks in China but the Chinese government still reports that there are 1,700 monasteries, temples and other sites of religious activity, with over 46,000 Buddhist monks. (white paper http://english.people.com.cn/features/t ... tibet.html).

10 Tambiah 1976: 266-67.

11 Another category of monks came to the Three Great Monastic Seats in Lhasa as young adults after spending their childhood monk years studying the basics in distant monasteries. They were called tharingga (“ones from far away”) and were organized slightly differently from the normal monks who entered directly as children since they were self-sufficient and were expected to return to their home monasteries after completing their advanced studies.

12 Monks received a salary from the monastery several times a year but this was typically not enough to subsist.

13 Actually, homosexual relations between the older monks and their young wards was not unknown in the great monastic seats and there were also some long-term “sexual” relationships among older monks living in households, but that issue goes beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice to say here that Tibetan monks considered homosexual sexual relations a breach of the vow of celibacy only if it involved penetration of an orifice such as the anus. Homosexual intercourse, therefore, was normally done between the thighs, and while not completely acceptable, was widely tolerated in the large monastic seats.

14 See Herrou, 2005 for an case where pseudo-kinship was utilized in a Taoist monastery in contemporary China.

15 Drepung did not teach its monks the calligraphic cursive writing script that was used by Tibetan government officials and higher monastic officials who dealt with managing monastic resources, so monks who wanted such positions had to learn it on their own.

16 A khe (khal) is a traditional volume unit that was equal to about 31 pounds of barley.

17 Interview, 1991, M.0142.01, Drepung, Tibet.

18 Interview, 1991, M.0030.01, Drepung, Tibet.

19 For discussions on Tibetan polyandry and the family see Goldstein 1971, 1976, 1978, and 1987.

20 Monks coming from distant regions were older and had already entered the monastic order in their home area so were treated very differently with respect to guardian teachers and monk households.

21 Anon. 1986.

22 White paper (http://english.people.com.cn/features/t ... tibet.html), page 1. Epstein 1991 cites 151 estates and 540 pasture areas.

23 White paper (http://english.people.com.cn/features/t ... tibet.html), page 1. Epstein 1991 cites 151 estates and 540 pasture areas.

24 See Goldstein 1989.

25 Goldstein 1998b, p. 34.

REFERENCES

Anon. The Education of a monk. Chöyang: The Voice of Tibetan Religion and Culture. 1(1): 41-45. *

Israel Epstein. Tibet Transformed. Beijing: New World Press, 1983.

Dunggar, Losang Trinley. The Merging of Religious and Secular Rule in Tibet. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991.

Melvyn C. Goldstein. Stratification, Polyandry and Family Structure in Tibet." Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 27, no. 1: 64-74, 1971.

________________. Serfdom and Mobility: An Examination of the Institution of 'Human Lease' in Traditional Tibetan Society. Journal of Asian Studies. Vol. XXX, No. 3, pp. 521-34. 1971.

_______________. Fraternal Polyandry and Fertility in a High Himalayan Valley in Northwest Nepal. Human Ecology. Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 223-233, 1976.

________________. Adjudication and Partition in the Tibetan Stem Family. In D. Buxbaum (ed.), Chinese Family Law and Social Change. University of Washington Press, 1978.

________________. Pahari and Tibetan Polyandry Revisited. Ethnology. 17(3): 325-347, 1978.

________________. When Brothers Share a Wife. Natural History. March, 1987

________________. A History of Modern Tibet, 1913-1951: The demise of the lamaist state. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1989.

________________. The Revival of Monastic Life in Drepung Monastery. In Goldstein and Kapstein (eds.) Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival & Cultural Identity. pp.16-52, 1998a.

_______________. Introduction. In Goldstein and Kapstein (eds.) Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival & Cultural Identity. pp.1-15, 1998b.

Melvyn C. Goldstein and M. Kapstein. Eds. Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and National Identity. U. of California Press, 1998.

Melvyn C. Goldstein and P. Tsarong. Tibetan Buddhist Monasticism: Social, Psychological and Cultural Implications. The Tibet Journal. 10(1): 14-31, 1985.

Adeline Herrou. La Vie entre soi les moine taoister aujourd’hui en China. Société d’ethnologie. Paris, 2005.

Stanley J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976.

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Henry Louis Vivian Derozio
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/19/20


Henry Louis Vivian Derozio
Bust of Derozio at the Esplanade
Born: 18 April 1809, Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India
Died: 26 December 1831 (aged 22), Calcutta, India
Resting place: South Park Street Cemetery, Mother Teresa Sarani
Occupation: Poet and teacher
Language: English and Bengali
Citizenship: British Indian
Genre: Academic, Educator
Literary movement: Bengal Renaissance
Notable works: To India - My Native Land



Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (18 April 1809 – 26 December 1831), was an Indian poet of Portuguese origin and assistant headmaster of Hindu College, Kolkata. He was a radical thinker of his time and one of the first Indian educators to disseminate Western learning and science among the young men of Bengal.

Long after his death (by cholera), his legacy lived on among his former students, who came to be known as Young Bengal and many of whom became prominent in social reform, law, and journalism.

Biography

Early life

Henry Louis Vivian Derozio was born on 18 April 1809 at Entally-Padmapukur in Kolkata. His parents were Francis Derozio, a Christian Indo-Portuguese office worker, and Sophia Johnson Derozio, an Englishwoman.[1][2] His original family name was 'De Rozario'.[3]

Derozio attended David Drummond's Dhurramtallah Academy school, where he was a pupil from the age of six to fourteen.[1][3][4] Derozio later praised his early schooling for its liberal approach to education, and particularly for its unusual choice to teach Indian, Eurasian and European children from different social classes together as peers.[4] Derozio's later religious skepticism is sometimes attributed to influence from David Drummond, who was known as a freethinker.[4] Derozio was a successful student: notices in the India Gazette and the Calcutta Journal at the time mentioned Derozio's academic excellence (including several academic prizes) and his success performances in student plays.[4]

At age 14, Derozio left school to work.[1] He initially joined his father's office in Kolkata, and later shifted to his uncle's indigo factory in Bhagalpur.[1] Inspired by the scenic beauty of the banks of the River Ganges, he started writing poetry, which he submitted to the India Gazette.[1] His poetic career began to flourish, with poems published in multiple newspapers and periodicals, in 1825.[4]

In 1827, when Derozio was eighteen, the editor John Grant took notice of Derozio's poetry, offering to publish a book of his work and inviting him to return to Kolkata.[1] He soon became an assistant editor for Grant, as well as publishing in several other periodicals, and founding his own newspaper, the Calcutta Gazette.[1]

Hindu College and Young Bengals

In May 1826, at the age of 17, he was appointed teacher in English literature and history at the new Hindu College. Derozio's intense zeal for teaching and his interactions with students created a sensation at Hindu College. He organized debates where ideas and social norms were freely debated. At the age of 18, became a Professor of English Literature and History at the Hindu College.[1] In 1828, he motivated his students to form a literary and debating club called the Academic Association.

This was a time when Hindu society in Bengal was undergoing considerable turmoil. In 1828, Raja Ram Mohan Roy established the Brahmo Samaj, which kept Hindu ideals but denied idolatry. This resulted in a backlash within orthodox Hindu society. Derozio helped release the ideas for social change already in the air. Despite his youth, he was considered a great scholar and a thinker. Within a short period, he drew around him a group of intelligent boys in college. He constantly encouraged them to think freely, to question and not to accept anything blindly. His teachings inspired the development of the spirit of liberty, equality, and freedom. They also tried to remove social evils, improve the condition of the women and the peasants, and promote liberty through freedom of the press, trial by jury, and so on. His activities brought about the intellectual revolution in Bengal. It was called the Young Bengal Movement and his students, also known as Derozians, were fiery patriots.

Due to backlash from conservative parents who disliked his wide-ranging and open discussion of religious issues, Derozio was dismissed from his post in April 1831, shortly before his death.[1]

His students came to be known as Derozians. In 1838, after his death, members of the Young Bengal movement established a second society called the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge. Its main objective was to acquire and disseminate knowledge about the condition of the country.

Death

Derozio died of cholera at an early age of 22 on 26 December 1831 in Calcutta. His body was buried in South Park Street Cemetery of Kolkata.

Writing

Derozio was generally considered an Anglo-Indian, being of mixed Portuguese descent, but he considered himself Indian.[2] Derozio was known during his lifetime as the first 'national' poet of modern India,[4] and the history of Anglo-Indian poetry typically begins with Derozio.[2] His poems are regarded as an important landmark in the history of patriotic poetry in India, especially "To India - My Native Land" and The Fakeer of Jungheera. He is influenced by Romantic poetry, especially the orientalism of poets like Lord Byron and Robert Southey.[5]

Publications

• Poems (1827)[1]
o "The Harp of India"[1][5]
o "Song of the Hindoostani Minstrel"[5]
• The Fakeer of Jungheera: A Metrical Tale and Other Poems (1828)[1]
o The Fakeer of Jungheera[1]
o "To India - My Native Land"[1]
• The Poetical Works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, ed. B.B. Shah (1907)[1]
o "To the Pupils of the Hindu College"[1]

Influence


Commemorative stamp of Derozio issued in 2009

Derizio's ideas had a profound influence on the social movement that came to be known as the Bengal Renaissance in early 19th century Bengal. And despite being viewed as something of an iconoclast by Alexander Duff and other (largely evangelical) Christian Missionaries; later in Duff's Assembly's Institution, Derozio's ideas on the acceptance of the rational spirit were accepted partly as long as they were not in conflict with basic tenets of Christianity, and as long as they critiqued orthodox Hinduism.

Derozio is generally believed to be partly responsible for the conversion of upper-caste Hindus like Krishna Mohan Banerjee[6] and Lal Behari Dey to Christianity. Samaren Roy, however, states that only three Hindu pupils among his first group of students became Christians, and asserts that Derozio had no role to play in their change of faith.[7] He points out that Derozio's dismissal was sought not only by Hindus such as Ramkamal Sen, but also by Christians such as H. H. Wilson.[7] Many other students like Tarachand Chakraborti became leaders in the Brahmo Samaj.[8]

Derozio's political activities have also been seen as crucially important to the development of a public sphere in Calcutta during British imperialism.[4]

A commemorative postage stamp of Derozio was issued on December 15, 2009.[5]

See also

• Poetry portal
• Young Bengal
• To India - My Native Land

References

1. Black, Joseph; Conolly, Leonard; Flint, Kate; Grundy, Isobel; Lepan, Don; Liuzza, Roy; McGann, Jerome J.; Prescott, Anne Lake; Qualls, Barry V.; Waters, Claire, eds. (4 December 2014). "Henry Louis Vivian Derozio". The Broadview anthology of British literature (Third ed.). Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. ISBN 978-1-55481-202-8. OCLC 894141161.
2. Reddy, Sheshalatha (2014). "Henry Derozio and the Romance of Rebellion (1809-1831)". DQR Studies in Literature. 53: 27–42. ISSN 0921-2507.
3. Bhattacharya Supriya (1 September 2009). Impressions 8, 2/E. Pearson Education India. pp. 1–. ISBN 978-81-317-2777-5. Retrieved 22 June 2012.
4. Chaudhuri, Rosinka (2010). "The Politics of Naming: Derozio in Two Formative Moments of Literary and Political Discourse, Calcutta, 1825–31". Modern Asian Studies. 44 (4): 857–885. doi:10.1017/S0026749X09003928. ISSN 0026-749X.
5. Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv (2013). ""Dark Interpretations": Romanticism's Ambiguous Legacy in India". In Casaliggi, Carmen; March-Russell, Paul (eds.). Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics. Routledge. pp. 215–230.
6. Das, Mayukh (2014). Reverend Krishnamohan Bandyopadhyaya. Kolkata: Paschimbanga Anchalik Itihas O Loksanskriti Charcha Kendra. ISBN 978-81-926316-0-8.
7. Jump up to:a b Roy, Samaren (1999). The Bengalees: glimpses of history and culture. New Delhi: Allied Publishers. p. 119. ISBN 81-7023-981-8. OCLC 45759369.
8. "Derozio And The Hindu College". Hindu School, Kolkata. Archived from the original on 10 August 2019.

External links

• Derozio section
• Old Poetry
• Poetry of Derozio
• Works by Henry Louis Vivian Derozio at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

[admin]

Presidency University, Kolkata [Hindu College] [Presidency College]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/19/20


Presidency University
Former names: Hindu College (1817–1855); Presidency College (1855–2010)
Motto: Excellence since 1817
Type: Public
Established: 20 January 1817; 203 years ago
Founders: Raja Rammohan Roy; David Hare; Sir Edward Hyde East; Raja Radhakanta Deb; Baidyanath Mukhopadhya; Rani Rashmoni; Rasamay Dutt
Chancellor: Governor of West Bengal
Vice-Chancellor: Professor Anuradha Lohia
Students: 2,198[1]
Undergraduates: 1,462[1]
Postgraduates: 736[1]
Alumni: Full list
Location: Kolkata, West Bengal, India
Campus: Urban
Affiliations: UGC, NAAC, AIU
Website: presiuniv.ac.in

Presidency University, Kolkata, formerly known as Hindoo College and Presidency College,[2] is a public state university located in College Street, Kolkata.[3] It is probably the oldest institution in the world to have no religious connection, having being established in 1817.[4] The institution was elevated to university status in 2010 after functioning as a top constituent college of the University of Calcutta for about 193 years. The University had its bicentenary celebrations in 2017.[5]

In its first cycle as a university, Presidency received the A grade with a score of 3.04/4.00 by the NAAC.[6] Presidency has been recognized as an "Institute of National Eminence" by the UGC.[7] It appeared in the inaugural top 50 of NIRF rankings in 2016. However, NIRF rankings in 2017 and 2018 excluded universities like Presidency University which taught only science and humanities but not engineering, commerce, agriculture, etc.[8]

History


The main entrance of the university at College Street


The Main Building corridor

With the creation of the Supreme Court of Calcutta in 1773 many Hindus of Bengal showed an eager interest in learning the English language. David Hare, in collaboration with Raja Radhakanta Deb had already taken steps to introduce English language education in Bengal. Babu Buddinath Mukherjee advanced the introduction of English as a medium of instruction further by enlisting the support of Sir Edward Hyde East, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Fort William, who called a meeting of 'European and Hindu Gentlemen' at his house in May 1816.[9] The purpose of the meeting was to "discuss the proposal to establish an institution for giving a liberal education to the children of the members of the Hindu Community". The proposal was received with unanimous approbation and a donation of over Rs. 100, 000 was promised for setting up the new college. Raja Ram Mohan Roy showed full support for the scheme, but chose not to come out in support of the proposal publicly for fear of "alarming the prejudices of his orthodox countrymen and thus marring the whole idea".[10]

The College was formally opened on Monday, 20 January 1817 with 20 'scholars'. The foundation committee of the college, which oversaw its establishment, was headed by Raja Rammohan Roy. The control of the institution was vested in a body of two Governors and four Directors. The first Governors of the college were Maharaja Tejchandra Bahadur of Burdwan and Gopee Mohan Thakoor. The first Directors were Gopi Mohun Deb of Sobhabazar, Joykissen Sinha, Radha Madhab Banerjee, and Gunganarain Doss. Buddinath Mukherjee was appointed as the first Secretary of the college. The newly established college mostly admitted Hindu students from affluent and progressive families, but also admitted non-Hindu students such as Muslims, Jews, Christians and Buddhists.

At first, the classes were held in a house belonging to Gorachand Bysack of Garanhatta (later renamed 304, Chitpore Road), which was rented by the college. In January 1818 the college moved to 'Feringhi Kamal Bose's house' which was located nearby in Chitpore.[11] From Chitpore, the college moved to Bowbazar and later to the building that now houses the Sanskrit College on College Street.[12]

Transformation to University


Memorial plaque of Ram Eqbal Singh


A part of the university

In 1972, an unsigned article was released by the faculty members of the college demanding that the college be given full university status. It is an open secret that the author of the article was Dipak Banerjee, the legendary economics professor of the college. The state government, then under the chief ministership of Siddhartha Shankar Ray, showed the willingness to listen to the demands of the faculty members, but it was still too early to grant full autonomy to the college. In 2007, the state government, under the chief ministership of Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and Higher Education ministership of Sudarshan Raychaudhuri, appointed a seven-member committee, under the leadership of Chittotosh Mookerjee. The other members of the committee included Ashes Prasad Mitra, Barun De, Bimal Jalan and Subimal Sen, to look into the possibility of upgrading the status of the college. The report of the committee suggested that the state government, while granting the college partial autonomy, should create more professorships and scholarships for meritorious students, thus making it possible for the grant of full autonomy to the college in the future.

In 2009, the Governing Body of the college unanimously adopted the proposal that the college should be given full university status. On 16 December 2009, the Government of West Bengal tabled a bill in Bidhansabha titled the Presidency University Act, 2009, in which the West Bengal Legislative Assembly granted full university status to the college. The bill stated that once the college becomes a full state-aided university it will be renamed Presidency University.

The new logo of the Presidency University has been created by Sabyasachi Dutta (সব্যসাচী দত্ত) as reported in a letter to the Editor of Anandabazar Patrika on 1 April 2013.

On 19 March 2010, the West Bengal Government passed the Presidency University Bill, 2009 in the State Legislative Assembly.[3] On 7 July 2010, the governor of West Bengal, M K Narayanan gave his assent to the Presidency University Bill.[13] On 23 July 2010, the Government of West Bengal published the gazette notification completing all the legal formalities for Presidency to become a full university.[14] Amiya Bagchi was given the responsibility of chairing a committee set up to select and appoint the first vice-chancellor of the university. Amita Chatterjee, a retired professor of philosophy at Jadavpur University, was appointed as the first Vice-Chancellor of Presidency University on 5 October 2010.[15]

In 2011, Higher Education Minister Bratya Basu suggested that a mentor group, along the lines of the Nalanda mentor group, would be formed to oversee the work of the university. At the beginning of June 2011, the chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, announced that a committee would be formed with Amartya Sen as its chief mentor and Harvard-based Sugata Bose as its chairman to oversee the running of the college and perform the task of appointing all its officials and faculty members. The Presidency mentor group [16] also includes as its members 2019 Economics Nobel Prize winner Abhijit Banerjee, Ashoke Sen, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Nayanjot Lahiri, Himadri Pakrashi, Rahul Mukerjee and Isher Judge Ahluwalia, Swapan Kumar Chakravorty. Sukanta Chaudhuri resigned from the committee in 2012.[17]

In October 2011, Malabika Sarkar, formerly Professor of English at Jadavpur University, was appointed Vice-Chancellor of Presidency University. During her term as Vice-Chancellor more than 150 faculty members - Presidency University's first faculty - were recruited and joined. Presidency's first officers and the first set of the non-teaching staff were also recruited. A new logo was created by an alumnus, infrastructural projects were initiated and the Presidency University Vice-Chancellor's Fund for Excellence was set up. In December 2012, UGC recognized the Presidency as an Institution of National Eminence. MOUs for international collaboration with Trinity College, Dublin, Groningen University, Netherlands, and D'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po, Paris) was signed. Presidency University's First Convocation was held on 22 August 2013 and the Foundation Stone for Presidency's Second Campus at Rajarhat was unveiled by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on 6 February 2014. Presidency's First Statutes were completed. Sarkar's tenure as Vice-Chancellor ended in May 2014.

After Sarkar's time-period expired, a new search committee was built by the state govt. and Chancellor of West Bengal. The search committee published a list of 3 Professors and sent it to the Chancellor. The first person in the list Sabyasachi Bhattacharya refused to join the administration and choose to teach at Presidency as the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Distinguished Chair Professor in the Department of Physics. Ultimately the position went to Anuradha Lohia, a past graduate of Presidency College, who was a senior professor at Bose Institute, a premier institution of research and scholarship in Kolkata. Lohia had taught a number of students for their Ph.D. research over many years in Bose Institute, affiliated for its Ph.D. degree with the Calcutta University.

The entrance of the campus is marked with a small guardhouse on the left. On the wall of the guard room is a plaque dedicated to durwan (guard) Ram Eqbal Singh, who died defending the institute from the rioters.[18]

Organisation Structure

Like every state university in West Bengal, Presidency is headed by the ceremonial post of the Chancellor. The Governor of West Bengal is the Chancellor of every university in the state. Jagdeep Dhankhar is presently incumbent in this post.[19]

The Vice-chancellor is the academic and administrative head of the institution. The post of the Vice-chancellor replaced that of the Principal after the Presidency received University status. Professor Anuradha Lohia is the first permanent vice-chancellor of the institution.[20] Administratively, Presidency is further headed by the Registrar. Dr. Debajyoti Konar is incumbent in this post.[21]

Academically, the University is composed of two faculties - Faculty of Natural and Mathematical sciences and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Both Faculties are headed by the respective deans. A total of 16 departments function under the university. They are: Bengali, English, Hindi, History, Performing Arts, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Life Sciences, Chemistry, Economics, Geography, Geology, Mathematics, Physics and Statistics.[22]

The Controller of Examinations, the Chief Librarian, the Finance Officer and the Dean of Students are other important office holders of the university.[22]

The University is guided by a mentor group. The Mentor Group is chaired by Sugata Bose, the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University. Nobel Laureate and economist Amartya Sen serves as the Advisor to the Chair.[23][24]

List of Principals and Vice Chancellors

Principals of Presidency College

• J. Kerr, 1842–1848
• David Lester Richardson, 1848–1849
• E. Lodge, 1849–1852
• J. Sutcliff, M.A., 1852–1856
• Leonidas Clint, 1856-1857
• E. Lodge, 1857-1858
• J. Sutcliffe, M.A., 1858–1863
• W. Grapel, 1863-1864
• J. Sutcliffe, M.A., 1864–1875
• H. Woodrow, 1875
• C. H. Tawney, 1875
• J. Sutcliffe, M.A., 1875
• Alfred Croft, 1876
• C. H. Tawney, 1876–1881
• G. Bellet, 1881–1882
• John Elliot, 1882–1883
• Alexander Pedler, 1883
• John Elliot, 1883
• G. Bellet, 1883
• John Elliot, 1884-1885
• C. H. Tawney, 1885
• W. Griffiths, 1885-1886
• C. H. Tawney, 1886–1887
• Alexander Pedler, 1887
• C. H. Tawney, 1887
• Alexander Pedler, 1887-1889
• C. H. Tawney, 1889
• Alexander Pedler, 1889
• Frederick James Rowe, 1889
• C. H. Tawney, 1889
• W. Griffiths, 1892–1896
• Alexander Pedler, 1896–1897
• J .H. Gilliland, 1897
• Frederick James Rowe, 1897-1898
• J.H.Gilliland, 1898
• Frederick James Rowe, 1898
• William Booth, 1898
• A. Clarke Edwards, 1899-1902
• Prasanna Kumar Roy, 1902
• A. Clarke Edwards, 1902–1903
• Prasanna Kumar Roy, 1903
• A. Clarke Edwards, 1903
• M. G. D. Prothero, 1904-1905
• Prasanna Kumar Roy, 1905-1906
• Alexander Macdonnell, 1906
• A. Clarke Edwards, 1906–1907
• Henry Rosher James, 1907–1909
• Hugh Melville Percival, 1909
• Henry Rosher James, 1909–1911
• C. W. Peake, 1911-1912
• Henry Rosher James, 1912–1916
• William Christopher Wordsworth, 1916–1917
• John Rothney Barrow, 1917-1924
• William Christopher Wordsworth, 1924
• H. E. Stapleton, 1924-1926
• T. S. Sterling, 1926-1927
• H. E. Stapleton, 1927–1928
• R. B. Ramsbotham, 1928–1929
• John Rothney Barrow, 1929–1930
• Jahangir Cooverjee Coyajee, 1930–1931
• Bhupatimohan Sen, 1931-1934
• Bhupatimohan Sen, 1934–1936
• Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, 1936
• Bhupatimohan Sen, 1936–1942
• Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, 1942
• Bhupatimohan Sen, 1942–1943
• Apurbakumar Chanda, 1943
• Jyotirmoy Ghosh, 1943-1944
• Apurbakumar Chanda, 1944
• Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, 1945-1946
• Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, 1946–1947
• Muhammad Qudrat-i-Khuda, 1947
• Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, 1947
• Jogischandra Sinha, 1947
• Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, 1948
• Jyotirmoy Ghosh, 1948–1950
• Jyotishchandra Sengupta, 1950
• Jyotirmoy Ghosh, 1950–1951
• Jyotishchandra Sengupta, 1951–1956
• F. J. Friend-Pereira, 1956–1958
• Sanat Kumar Basu, 1958–1967
• Rajendralal Sengupta, 1967–1969
• Samerendranath Ghoshal, 1969–1970
• Sudhir Chandra Shome, 1970
• Pratul Chandra Mukherjee, 1970–1975
• Sudhir Chandra Shome, 1975–1976
• Pratul Chandra Mukherjee, 1976–1979
• Bijoy Shankar Basak, 1979–1982
• Achinta Kumar Mukherjee, 1982–1986
• Sunil Kumar Rai Chaudhuri, 1986–1991
• Amal Kumar Mukhopadhyay, 1991–1997
• Nitai Charan Mukherjee, 1997–2000
• Amitava Chatterjee, 2001–2005
• Mamata Ray, 2005–2008
• Sanjib Ghosh, 2008–2010
• Amitava Chatterjee, 2010

Vice Chancellors of Presidency University

• Amita Chatterjee, 2010–2011
• Malabika Sarkar, 2011-2014
• Anuradha Lohia, 2014–present

Admission

Admission to this institution for undergraduate and postgraduate courses is currently granted on the basis of marks secured in admission tests, PUBDET and PUMDET respectively. Both PUBDET and PUMDET are organised by West Bengal Joint Entrance Examinations Board.

Notable alumni

See also: List of Kolkata Presidencians

Presidency University has many notable alumni. They include at least four heads of states, five Chief Ministers of West Bengal, four Chief Justices of India, one Governor of RBI, one Oscar winner, multiple Padma awardees, at least six Sahitya Akademi Awardes, Several national award winning Film Directors, at least 15 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar laureates, one Breakthrough Prize winner, two Nobel laureates (Presidency is the only institution in India to have provided foundational education for more than one), one Kyoto Prize winner, multiple academics serving as professors in premier Universities of the world and several civil servants serving in senior capacities.

References

1. CU information brochure for MSc, BTech Retrieved 25 November 2011
2. Chakraborty, Rachana (2012). "Presidency College". In Islam, Sirajul; Jamal, Ahmed A. (eds.). Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh (Second ed.). Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.
3. Our Bureau (20 March 2010). "The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Frontpage | CM beats Mamata to Presidency". Telegraphindia.com. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
4. Jan 6, Subhro Niyogi | TNN |; 2017; Ist, 6:00. "Presidency University, probably world's first secular institute: Amartya Sen | Kolkata News - Times of India". The Times of India. Retrieved 14 January2020.
5. "200 Years of a Legacy". Tribune India. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
6. "Presidency university gets top NAAC rating - Times of India". The Times of India. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
7. "Legacy of Presidency University". http://www.presiuniv.ac.in. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
8. "'Presidency University missed rank as it offers only arts, science' - Times of India". The Times of India. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
9. "Presidency University". http://www.presiuniv.ac.in. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
10. "Presidency University". http://www.presiuniv.ac.in. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
11. This building is a historic one because Raja Ram Mohan Roy inaugurated his Brahma Sabha there and Alexander Duff of the Scottish Missionary Board started his educational establishment, the General Assembly's Institution there as well a few years later in 1830.
12. "Ad Age Homepage - Ad Age". http://www.adageindia.in. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
13. Presidency varsity bill gets governor's assent
14. Express News Service (24 July 2010). "Presidency University legal steps complete". Express India. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
15. "The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Frontpage | Comfort factor confines Presidency to home pool". Telegraphindia.com. 6 October 2010. Retrieved 1 August 2012.
16. "Presidency Mentor Group". Retrieved 26 November 2013.
17. "Sukanta Chaudhuri quits". Retrieved 26 November 2013.
18. Our Bureau (14 April 2013). "Presi guardian angel". The Telegraph, Calcutta. Retrieved 6 May2014.
19. "Presidency University vice-chancellor meets Governor, Partha - Times of India". The Times of India. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
20. "Decks cleared for re-appointing Anuradha Lohia as the VC of Presidency University - Times of India". The Times of India. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
21. "Presi Registrar invites nominees for VC". The Telegraph. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
22. "Presidency - Organisation Structure". Retrieved 28 June 2018.
23. "Quality faculty top priority: Presidency mentor group". The Hindu. Special Correspondent, Special Correspondent. 26 August 2011. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 28 June 2018.
24. India, Press Trust of (24 December 2017). "Presidency Mentor Group to reach out to brilliant students in". Business Standard India. Retrieved 28 June 2018.

External links

• Official website

[admin]

Puran Chand Joshi
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/19/20


Puran Chand Joshi
General Secretary, Communist Party of India
In office: 1935–1947
Preceded by: Position established
Succeeded by: B.T. Ranadive
Personal details
Born: 14 April 1907, Almora, United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, British India
Died: 9 November 1980 (aged 73), Delhi, India
Occupation: Leader

Puran Chand Joshi (14 April 1907 – 9 November 1980), one of the early leaders of the communist movement in India. He was the first general secretary of the Communist Party of India from 1935–47.

Early years

Joshi was born on 14 April 1907,[1] in a Kumaoni Hindu family of Almora, in Uttarakhand. His father Harinandan Joshi was a teacher. In 1928, he passed his M.A. examination from the Allahabad University. Soon, he became the General secretary of the Workers and Peasants Party of Uttar Pradesh, formed at Meerut in October 1928.[1] In 1929, at the age of 22, the British Government arrested him as one of the suspects of the Meerut Conspiracy Case. The other early communist leaders who were arrested along with him included Shaukat Usmani, Muzaffar Ahmed, S.A. Dange and G.V. Ghate.

Portrait of 25 of the Meerut Prisoners taken outside the jail. Back row (left to right): K. N. Sehgal, S. S. Josh, H. L. Hutchinson, Shaukat Usmani, B. F. Bradley, A. Prasad, P. Spratt, G. Adhikari. Middle Row: Radharaman Mitra, Gopen Chakravarti, Kishori Lal Ghosh, L. R. Kadam, D. R. Thengdi, Goura Shanker, S. Bannerjee, K. N. Joglekar, P. C. Joshi, Muzaffar Ahmed. Front Row: M. G. Desai, D. Goswami, R.S. Nimbkar, S.S. Mirajkar, S.A. Dange, S. V. Ghate, Gopal Basak.

The Meerut Conspiracy Case was a controversial court case initiated in British India in March 1929 and decided in 1933. Several trade unionists, including three Englishmen were arrested for organizing an Indian railway strike. The British Government convicted 27 leftist trade union leaders under a false lawsuit. The trial immediately caught attention in England, where it inspired the 1932 play Meerut by Manchester street theatre group the 'Red Megaphones', highlighting the detrimental effects of colonisation and industrialisation....

The main charges were that in 1921 S.A. Dange, Shaukat Usmani and Muzaffar Ahmed entered into a conspiracy to establish a branch of the Comintern in India and they were helped by various persons, including the accused Philip Spratt and Benjamin Francis Bradley, sent to India by the Communist International. The aim of the accused persons, according to the charges raised against them was under section 121-A of the Indian Penal Code (Act 45 of 1860)...

Though all the accused were not communists, the charges framed against them portrayed the British government's fear for growth of communist ideas in India. In the trial the accused were all labeled as Bolsheviks. During the trial of four and a half years, the defendants turned the courtroom into a public platform to espouse their cause. As a result, the trial saw strengthening of the communist movement in the country.

-- Meerut Conspiracy Case, by Wikipedia

Joshi was given six years of transportation to the penal settlement of Andaman Islands. Considering his age, the punishment was later reduced to three. After his release in 1933, Joshi worked towards bringing a number of groups under the banner of the Communist Party of India (CPI). In 1934 the CPI was admitted to the Third International or Comintern.

As the General Secretary

After the sudden arrest of Somnath Lahiri, then Secretary of CPI, during end-1935, Joshi became the new General Secretary. He thus became the first general secretary of Communist Party of India, for a period from 1935 to 1947. At that time the left movement was steadily growing and the British government banned communist activities from 1934 to 1938. In February 1938, when the Communist Party of India started in Bombay its first legal organ, the National Front, Joshi became its editor.[1] The Raj re-banned the CPI in 1939, for its initial anti-War stance. When, in 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the CPI proclaimed that the nature of the war has changed to a people's war against fascism.

War was declared in September 1939. The tensions within the Congress Socialist Party between communists and others were by now acute. But all agreed, initially at least, on the need to oppose the war -- the Congress because Britain's Viceroy in New Delhi had declared that India was at war with Germany without the agreement (or indeed seeking the agreement) of India's political leaders, and the communists because Moscow, in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact, had declared that this was an imperialist war. By the end of October 1939 more than 150 Punjabi politicians were in jail, and by the end of the following year that number had swelled to many hundreds. Punjab led the rest of India in the number of communists and socialists detained -- generally on the grounds of their anti-war and anti-recruitment activities.

B.P.L. Bedi was, by his own account, publishing anti-war literature and using his contacts in the rail unions to help get the leaflets circulated around the country. He was not among the early wave of arrests, but he knew that he was likely to be detained before long. That knock on the door came in early December 1940. 'I had just come from Lahore and the British Superintendent of police had arrived,' Bedi recalled. 'Soon after my servant told me that there seemed to be some peculiar movement of people round the bushes so I immediately sensed that the moment of my arrest had come. Within ten minutes of his announcing this, he arrived and in a very British way said, "I am afraid I have to arrest you.''' In an even more British manner, Bedi asked the police officer to sit down and have a cup of tea while he packed a blanket, some clothes and a few books. Bedi was at this time on the national executive of the Congress Socialist Party and his arrest under the Defence of India Act was front page news in the Tribune. It reported that as he was being driven away in the police car, 'Mrs Bedi raised loud shouts of "Inquilab Zindabad"' -- a communist slogan which best translates as 'Long Live the Revolution'.

Bedi was held briefly in the jail in the town of Montgomery (now Sahiwal), still in Punjab but some distance from Lahore, and then was sent more than 400 miles away to Deoli, a remote spot on the edge of the Thar desert in what is now Rajasthan. A Victorian-era military base there had been turned into a detention camp -- a concentration camp, the communists complained -- for political detainees from across India. It had a long history of being used to lock-up 'undesirables', and continued to fulfil that role in later years. From 1942, the camp housed prisoners of war -- and in 1962, it was used to intern Indians of Chinese origin during a brief India-China border conflict. As soon as he reached Deoli, Bedi began to protest against his detention -- refusing to carry his bags into the camp as a statement, in his own words, that the 'revolutionaries' had arrived. 'At Deoli were nearly four-hundred persons, who were all Leftists ... From the moment we arrived we started planning to create more trouble and a hunger strike was on the agenda.'

Freda can hardly have been surprised by her husband's arrest, but she was certainly angered by it.....

A couple of days later, she announced that she too intended to flout the wartime emergency regulations and was happy to take the consequences. The Tribune reported that she had sought Gandhi's permission to give herself up for arrest. 'Should Mahatma Gandhi's permission be secured, Mrs Bedi will be the first English lady to offer satyagraha in the civil disobedience campaign.' Freda regarded Gandhi's campaign as 'halting and incomplete' -- but it was at least action on a nationwide scale. 'There should have been a great, a magnificent up-surge of the nation. Gandhiji decreed otherwise, and chose his men with the greatest care. Only the few were to go to jail to protest for the many. It was to be a demonstration to the world of India's national right.'

At the end of January, Freda heard that Gandhi had agreed to her request -- she believed she was the fifty-seventh volunteer to be chosen as a satyagrahi in this stage of the civil disobedience campaign. This was Freda's boldest political act -- she was putting herself forward for arrest and imprisonment to protest against her native country's treatment of her adopted country. 'She said that she was born in England but had adopted India as her mother country,' the Tribune reported, 'and would wish to be known as an Indian woman.'... In the carefully choreographed way of these protests, Freda wrote to the district magistrate in the town of Gurdaspur to tell him exactly when and where she intended to stage her act of civil disobedience. 'Mrs Freda Bedi left for Dera Baba Nanak,' the Tribune announced on its front page, 'where she will offer satyagraha on 21st [February] at 11 a.m.'...

'We wrote a letter to the district magistrate,' Freda recalled, 'saying that we would break the law by asking the people not to support the military effort until India became democratic and that India must get her elected government first. But since we sent the letter, we effectively prevented ourselves from speaking because on the day we were supposed to speak we were naturally arrested before this happened.' Exactly what happened in the village that February morning is difficult to establish beyond doubt through the layers of valorous nationalist narrative and family folklore. Freda's own account is both the most straightforward and most credible. Her intention was to shout anti-war slogans in Punjabi in the village streets. She heard that the local inspector had summoned an English officer from Amritsar, thinking it best to have an Englishman to hand when an Englishwoman was placed under arrest. 'At eight-thirty they arrived. In the centre was the local Inspector with a beard. He came forward politely, "regretting that it is my duty but I must arrest you." The turbanned police-officer on his left had a half-smile. To the right was the European Inspector from Amritsar in an unwieldy topee [hat]. He was surprisingly small and had a walrus moustache. He looked like Old Bill: I wanted to laugh, and the corners of my mouth twitched. "Yes, I am quite ready. Take me along with you.'"...

A few weeks after Freda emerged from Lahore jail, the war took a turn which had direct repercussions for both her and her husband. Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and attacked the Soviet Union, his erstwhile ally. Communist parties which had already carried out one contortion when the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact became public knowledge and changed overnight from describing the conflict as a war against fascism to an imperialist war were again wrong-footed. The British party quickly fell in line with Moscow and came to hail a people's war which needed to be prosecuted zealously, not least to protect Soviet communism from the Nazi aggressor. The Indian party was slower to respond to the changing contours of the conflict -- in part because of a reluctance to make common cause with the Imperial power, and in part because the detention of so many leading left-wingers hampered debate and decision making. By the close of 1941, Indian communists were coming to accept the need to support the allied war effort against Germany and Japan. In April 1942, the communists confirmed their change of strategy, and so decided to support the war and all it entailed. Three months later, the Communist Party of India was legalised. This support for the prosecution of the war was not a popular move in India. 'It alienated us completely from the national movement ... ' Bedi recalled, 'but at the same time the conviction was so deep that anti-fascism struggle had to be carried on.' It also sharpened the distinction between communists and other progressive strands of nationalism. In August 1942, Congress launched the Quit India agitation which placed achieving independence ahead of fighting Germany and Japan, and which also entailed the detention of most Congress leaders for the remainder of the war; in that same month, the more radical nationalists led by Subhas Bose established the Indian National Army to fight alongside the Japanese in an attempt to evict Britain from India. The communists stood aloof from both endeavours.

Towards the close of 1941, a Friends of the Soviet Union association was established in Calcutta. Freda Bedi promptly took to the platform to endorse the campaign... 'The spirit that animates Russia in her magnificent resistance to Nazi barbarism will never die,' she told a students' conference at Lahore's Bradlaugh Hall at the end of November. She read a telegram from Bedi sent from Deoli, and passed by the censors there so in a sense approved by the British authorities: "'Convey students glowing greetings towards peace and progress through vigorously functioning Punjab Friends of Soviet.''' Within weeks, the new association had established a regional organisation in Punjab and Freda became the provincial organiser. It was the most prominent position she took in Indian politics, ... she had a standing and reputation which helped the pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi, message percolate beyond the immediate ranks of the still underground CPI and its supporters....she was an exceptional organiser as well as an accomplished orator. The British communist intellectual Victor Kiernan was in Lahore at this time and regarded Freda highly, considering that she was 'emerging as one of the most effective of a new generation of Party leaders'....

No meeting was held in Lahore those days where Bedi did not speak or Freda Bedi did not speak....

'Our platform is non-party,' Freda insisted, not entirely convincingly, when seeking support for the initial conference of the Punjab section of the Friends of the Soviet Union, 'and the object of the organisation is to draw together all those who sympathise with the Soviets in their epic struggle against the Nazi hordes, whether on cultural, political or humanitarian ground.' On another occasion she spoke of the Second World War as an 'international civil war' and asserted that 'it is to Russia that the poor and neglected of the world look'. She spoke widely, warning that India would have 'greater troubles' if Japan triumphed while also raising money for medical supplies for the Soviet Union and -- as a civil liberties activist -- continuing to campaign for the release of political detainees.

The detention camp in Deoli served, as Imperial jails and detention camps so often did, as a recruiting ground for communism. The factionalising on the left evident before the war was played out behind the barbed wire too. But the communists were the best organised and intellectually the most confident, and the bulk of the detainees rallied to their standard. The communists had already made a determined attempt to take control of the Congress Socialist Party at its conference in Lahore in April 1938. Bedi's own account was that, in Punjab at least, there was no real need for the party to capture the provincial CSP, because most of its members had been won over to communism. He also details, however, how the CPI acted as a caucus within the wider party -- establishing its own line on issues of policy and organisation and distributing secret circulars not to be shared with those with non-communists in the CSP....

By his own account, he was an important figure in the excited debates about communist strategy which helped wile away the long hours in the barracks. And he aligned himself with the hardliners in the party, such as B.T. Ranadive, and urged loyalty to Stalin and active support for the defence of the Soviet Union.

With communists now one of the few organised political groups in India to support the allied war effort, there was little purpose in keeping so many of their leading cadres locked up. A handful of Punjabi communist leaders were released in April 1942 -- even before the ban on the CPI was lifted. Bedi appears to have been part of the group....

By early May 1942, B.P.L. was back in Lahore. He was guest of honour at a function arranged by 'prominent citizens' where he thanked the people of Lahore and all those 'who had helped detenus [sic] by keeping up the agitation for release and rendered other help.' Far from being chastened by his sixteen months in detention, he was back on the podium and even more militant than before. He presided over an 'anti-Japanese Day' meeting in Lahore and stormed that 'guerilla bands should be formed in the Punjab, especially among the rural area for the protection of their hearths and homes. Mr Bedi declared that he would enrol ten lakhs of guerillas in the Punjab.' ... it was a declaration of militancy, or political fervour in repulsing the Axis powers and so defending Soviet communism.

-- The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi, by Andrew Whitehead

Expulsion and rehabilitation

In the post-freedom period, the Communist Party of India, after the second congress in Calcutta (new spelling: Kolkata) adopted a path of taking up arms. Joshi was advocating unity with Indian National Congress under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru. He was severely criticized in the Calcutta congress of the CPI in 1948 and was removed from the general secretaryship. Subsequently, he was suspended from the Party on 27 January 1949, expelled in December 1949 and readmitted to the Party on 1 June 1951. Gradually he was sidelined, though rehabilitated through making him the editor of the Party weekly, New Age. After the Communist Party of India split, he was with the CPI. Though he explained the policy of the CPI in the 7th congress in 1964, he was never brought in the leadership directly.

Last days

In his last days, he kept himself busy in research and publication works in Jawaharlal Nehru University to establish an archive on the Indian communist movement.

Personal life

In 1943, he married Kalpana Datta (1913–1995), a revolutionary, who participated in the Chittagong armoury raid.

Chittagong armoury raid, also known as the Chittagong uprising, was an attempt on 18 April 1930 to raid the armoury of police and auxiliary forces from the Chittagong armoury in the Bengal Presidency of British India (now in Bangladesh) by armed Indian independence fighters led by Surya Sen.

The raiders were members of revolutionary groups who favoured armed uprisings as a means to achieve India's independence from British colonial rule. They were inspired by the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland and led by Surya Sen. However, they were ideologically influenced more by the Communists in Soviet Russia. Many of these raiders later became Communists. The group included Ganesh Ghosh, Lokenath Bal, Ambika Chakrobarty, Harigopal Bal (Tegra), Ananta Singh, Anand Prasad Gupta, Tripura Sen, Bidhubhusan Bhattacharya, Pritilata Waddedar, Kalpana Dutta, Himangshu Sen, Binod Bihari Chowdhury, Subodh Roy, Monoranjan Bhattacharya.

Sen devised a plan to capture the two main armouries in Chittagong, destroy the telegraph and telephone office, and take as hostages members of the European Club, the majority of whom also to be raided, while rail and communication lines were to be cut in order to sever Chittagong from Calcutta. Imperial banks at Chittagong were to be looted to gather money for further uprisings, and various jailed revolutionaries would be free.

The plan was put into action at 10 p.m. on 18 April 1930. The police armoury (in Police Line in Dampara) was captured by a group of revolutionaries led by Ganesh Ghosh, while another group of ten men led by Lokenath Bal took the Auxiliary Forces armoury (now the old Circuit House). Some 65 people took part in the raid, undertaken in the name of Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch. They failed to locate ammunition but did succeed in cutting telephone and telegraph wires and disrupting train movements.

About 16 of the group captured the European club's headquarters (in Pahartali, now the Railway Office next to Shahjahan Field) but there were few club members present because of it being Good Friday. Upon learning of the situation, the Europeans were able to get the alarm out to troops, which the revolutionaries had not expected. After the raids, the revolutionaries gathered outside the police armoury, where Sen took a military salute, hoisted a national flag, and proclaimed a Provisional Revolutionary Government. The revolutionaries left Chittagong town before dawn and marched towards the Chittagong hill ranges, looking for a safe place to hide.

A few of the members including Ganesh Ghosh, Ananta Singh and the teenagers Ananda Gupta and Jeebon Ghoshal were elsewhere, and almost captured at Feni railway station but managed to escape. Later they stayed in hiding in a house in Chandannagar.

After a few days, the police traced some of the revolutionaries. They were surrounded by several thousand troops while they took shelter in Jalalabad hills near Chittagong Cantonment on the afternoon of 22 April 1930.

Over 80 troops and 12 revolutionaries were killed in the ensuing gunfight in the Battle of Jalalabad Hills. Sen dispersed his men to neighbouring villages in small groups and thus some escaped. A few fled to Calcutta while some were arrested. An intense crackdown on the resistance ensued. Ananta Singh gave himself up in Calcutta coming away from his hiding place in Chandannagar, to be close to the young teenagers captured and under trial in Chittagong. A few months later, Police Commissioner Charles Tegart surrounded their hideout and in the ensuing exchange of fire, Jiban Ghoshal was killed.

Some of the revolutionaries managed to reorganise. On 24 September 1932, Debi Prasad Gupta, Manoranjan Sen, Rajat Sen, Swadesh Roy, Phanindra Nandi and Subodh Chaudhary led by Pritilata Waddedar, attacked the Pahartali European Club, killing one woman and injuring several police officials. However, the plan wasn't entirely successful. After the attack, the revolutionaries fled but Pritilata who got wounded consumed cyanide to evade arrest and killed herself. The police searched the rest of the absconders. In Kalarpole encounter Deba Gupta, Manoranjan Sen, Rajat Sen and Swadeshranjan Ray were killed while the other two, Subodh and Phani were wounded and arrested. During 1930-32, 22 officials and 220 others were killed by revolutionaries in separate incidents. Debi Prasad Gupta's brother, was sentenced to transportation for life.

The mass trial of those arrested during and after the raids concluded in January 1932 and the judgement was delivered on 1 March 1932. Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to deportation for life, two received three-year prison sentences and the remaining 32 individuals were acquitted. The twelve deported to Andaman included Ganesh Ghosh, Lokenath Bal, (in 1932) sixteen year old Ananda Gupta, and Ananta Singh.

The Chittagong revolutionary group suffered a fatal blow when Masterda Surya Sen was arrested on 16 February 1933 from Gairala village after a tip-off from an insider of the group. For the reward money, jealousy, or both, Netra Sen told the British Government that Surya Sen was at his house. But before Netra Sen was able to get his 10,000 rupee reward, he was assassinated by the revolutionaries.

Surya Sen along with Tarakeswar Dastidar were hanged by the British Administration on the 12th of January 1934 after inhuman torture in prison.

-- Chittagong armoury raid, by Wikipedia

They had two sons, Chand and Suraj. Chand Joshi (1946-2000) was a noted journalist, who worked for the Hindustan Times. He was also known for his work, Bhindranwale: Myth and Reality (1985). Chand's second wife Manini (née Chatterjee, b 1961) is also a journalist, who works for The Telegraph. Manini Chatterjee penned a book on the Chittagong armoury raid, titled, Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930-34 (1999).[2]

See also

• Kumaon
• Kumauni People

References

1. Chandra, Bipan (22 December 2007). "P.C. Joshi : A Political Journey". Mainstream weekly. Retrieved 18 October 2010.
2. "This above All". The Tribune. 5 February 2000. Retrieved 19 May 2010.

Further reading

• Chakravartty, Gargi (2007). P.C. Joshi: A Biography, New Delhi: National Book Trust, ISBN 978-81-237-5052-1.

External links

• The Hindu report on P.C. Joshi denying split in CPI
• Biography of Puran Chand Joshi

[admin]

Victor Kiernan
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/19/20

A few weeks after Freda emerged from Lahore jail, the war took a turn which had direct repercussions for both her and her husband. Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and attacked the Soviet Union, his erstwhile ally. Communist parties which had already carried out one contortion when the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact became public knowledge and changed overnight from describing the conflict as a war against fascism to an imperialist war were again wrong-footed. The British party quickly fell in line with Moscow and came to hail a people's war which needed to be prosecuted zealously, not least to protect Soviet communism from the Nazi aggressor. The Indian party was slower to respond to the changing contours of the conflict -- in part because of a reluctance to make common cause with the Imperial power, and in part because the detention of so many leading left-wingers hampered debate and decision making. By the close of 1941, Indian communists were coming to accept the need to support the allied war effort against Germany and Japan. In April 1942, the communists confirmed their change of strategy, and so decided to support the war and all it entailed. Three months later, the Communist Party of India was legalised. This support for the prosecution of the war was not a popular move in India. 'It alienated us completely from the national movement ... ' Bedi recalled, 'but at the same time the conviction was so deep that anti-fascism struggle had to be carried on.' It also sharpened the distinction between communists and other progressive strands of nationalism. In August 1942, Congress launched the Quit India agitation which placed achieving independence ahead of fighting Germany and Japan, and which also entailed the detention of most Congress leaders for the remainder of the war; in that same month, the more radical nationalists led by Subhas Bose established the Indian National Army to fight alongside the Japanese in an attempt to evict Britain from India. The communists stood aloof from both endeavours.

Towards the close of 1941, a Friends of the Soviet Union association was established in Calcutta. Freda Bedi promptly took to the platform to endorse the campaign... 'The spirit that animates Russia in her magnificent resistance to Nazi barbarism will never die,' she told a students' conference at Lahore's Bradlaugh Hall at the end of November. She read a telegram from Bedi sent from Deoli, and passed by the censors there so in a sense approved by the British authorities: "'Convey students glowing greetings towards peace and progress through vigorously functioning Punjab Friends of Soviet.''' Within weeks, the new association had established a regional organisation in Punjab and Freda became the provincial organiser. It was the most prominent position she took in Indian politics, ... she had a standing and reputation which helped the pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi, message percolate beyond the immediate ranks of the still underground CPI and its supporters....she was an exceptional organiser as well as an accomplished orator. The British communist intellectual Victor Kiernan was in Lahore at this time and regarded Freda highly, considering that she was 'emerging as one of the most effective of a new generation of Party leaders'....

No meeting was held in Lahore those days where Bedi did not speak or Freda Bedi did not speak....

'Our platform is non-party,' Freda insisted, not entirely convincingly, when seeking support for the initial conference of the Punjab section of the Friends of the Soviet Union, 'and the object of the organisation is to draw together all those who sympathise with the Soviets in their epic struggle against the Nazi hordes, whether on cultural, political or humanitarian ground.' On another occasion she spoke of the Second World War as an 'international civil war' and asserted that 'it is to Russia that the poor and neglected of the world look'.

-- The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi, by Andrew Whitehead

Edward Victor Gordon Kiernan (4 September 1913 – 17 February 2009) was a British Marxist historian and a member of the Communist Party Historians Group. He was recognised as one of the most wide-ranging of global historians. While his middle name came from one of British imperialism's greatest heroes, General 'Chinese' Gordon of Khartoum, he emerged as one of Britain's foremost ideological warriors against empire.[1]

Life

Born in Ashton-on-Mersey, a southern district of Manchester, Kiernan was one of three children born to Ella née Young and John Edward Kiernan, who served as a translator of Spanish and Portuguese for the privately owned Manchester Ship Canal. His family came from a congregationalist, non-conformist religious tradition that he later suggested played a role in his socialist formation and that of many of the Communist Party Historians Group founded in 1946.

A scholarship student at the Manchester Grammar School, Kiernan developed a passion for the classics, as he added ancient Greek and Latin to the modern European languages he had already learned at home. Propelled with three new scholarships, he went on to Trinity College, Cambridge where he achieved a double-starred First in History (B.A.,1934; M.A., 1937). Recruited by Guy Burgess during a time of radical ferment among Cambridge students, Kiernan joined the Communist Party in 1934.

Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess (16 April 1911 – 30 August 1963) was a British diplomat and Soviet agent, a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring that operated from the mid-1930s to the early years of the Cold War era. His defection in 1951 to the Soviet Union, with his fellow spy Donald Maclean, led to a serious breach in Anglo-United States intelligence co-operation, and caused long-lasting disruption and demoralisation in Britain's foreign and diplomatic services.

-- Guy Burgess, by Wikipedia

He found his radicalism subsequently reinforced by what he regarded as the treachery of Britain's elites. Perhaps the greatest influence on Kiernan was Maurice Dobb. A lecturer in economics at Cambridge, he had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920 and was open with his students about his communist beliefs. Kiernan later wrote: "We had no time then to assimilate Marxist theory more than very roughly; it was only beginning to take root in England, although it had one remarkable expounder at Cambridge in Maurice Dobb."

Dobb joined the Communist Party in 1920 and during the 1930s was central to the burgeoning Communist movement at the university. One of his recruits was Kim Philby, who later became a high-placed mole within British intelligence. It has been suggested that Dobb was a "talent-spotter" for the Comintern.

-- Maurice Dobb, by Wikipedia

In 1938, as a junior fellow, Kiernan departed for Bombay in to continue his political activities and to teach at the Sikh National College and Aitchison College in Lahore, India (now Pakistan). Shortly after his arrival he married the theatre activist and childhood friend of Indira Nehru, Shanta Gandhi.

Shanta Kalidas Gandhi (20 December 1917 – 6 May 2002) was an Indian theatre director, dancer and playwright who was closely associated with IPTA, the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India. She studied with Indira Gandhi at a residential school in the early 1930s, and remained close to the prime minister in later life. She received many government awards and sinecures under the Indira Gandhi administration, including the Padma Shri (1984) and being made chairperson of the National School of Drama (1982–84)....

She joined Pupil's Own School, an experimental residential school in Pune in 1932, where she became friends with classmate Indira Nehru. She later moved to Bombay, when her engineer father found her becoming too involved in the left-wing student movement in the 1930s and sent her to England to study medicine. In London she stayed at a Fairfax Road boarding house across the hallway from Indira. Feroze Gandhi lived nearby, and the three of them would go out on the town together. When Indira and Feroze secretly became engaged in 1936, Shanta was the only other person to know about it. Soon she started frequenting India House, meeting up with Krishna Menon and his young 'Free India' associates, and even joined a dance troupe to raise funds for the Spanish Civil War. But before long her father called her back, as the World War II in Europe was starting, thus ending a possible medical career....

In 1952, she started working with a group of children in the village Nikora, on the banks of the Narmada River, in South Gujarat with an informal curriculum. Later, an experimental school attached to the B.M. Institute of Child Psychology and Development, Ahmedabad, adopted this format and in the 1970s at the Bal Bhavan, Delhi took it as well, eventually Avehi was formed in 1981 and in 1990 in 1990 when AVEHI took up the programme, and named it ABACUS with Shanta Gandhi as Director.

In 1958, Shanta Gandhi was called to Delhi as Asian Theatre Institute was being set up, she joined a Professor of Ancient Indian Drama, in the following year when it merged with the National School of Drama, she continued teaching and in the coming years revived ancient Indian plays starting with Sanskrit drama masters, Kalidasa, Bhasa, Vishakhadatta and Bhavabhuti. She was first to revive 4th century BC, Sanskrit playwright, Bhasa's through her productions of Madhyamavyayoga (1966) (The Middle One) and Urubhanga (The Broken Thigh), a decade before Pannikar and Ratan Thiyam began working with them.[12] She later directed Vishakhadatta's Mudrarakshasa, Virkam Varman's Bhagavadajjukam (1967) all in Hindi. In 1967, she wrote Jasma Odan in Gujarati based on a folk tale, subsequently she translated it in Malavi Hindi with Dr. Shyam Parmar, the result was her most noted production of the Bhavai-based musical Jasma Odhan in 1968, with NSD Repertory Company featuring actors like Manohar Singh and Uttara Baokar. She also did the design for the play, and it resurrected the Bhavai folk theatre from Gujarat.

-- Shanta Gandhi, by Wikipedia

Though they remained friends, they split up when Kiernan returned to Cambridge in 1946 to complete his Fellowship.

Spurned by both Cambridge and Oxford, Kiernan was offered a lectureship in 1948 at the University of Edinburgh, thanks to the intervention of the distinguished historian Richard Pares. In 1970, Kiernan was given a Personal Chair in Modern History; a position he held until his retirement in 1977. Having joined the CPGB in 1934, he finally left in 1959, chiefly in disgust at the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, after which, he said: "I waited in hopes the party might improve. It didn't."

In 1993 at the age of 80, Kiernan produced Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen a book he had been working on since 1947. A second volume, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare, followed in 1996. His final book, Horace: Poetics and Politics appeared in 1999. Kiernan died peacefully in his sleep, aged 95, in Stow, Scotland.

Intellectual legacy

Kiernan made immense contributions to the post-war flowering of British Marxist historiography that transformed the understanding of social history. Seeking escape paths from a congealing Stalinism, this intellectual movement grew from several figures among them - E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Kiernan and Eric Hobsbawm. Brash and confident in wielding the best of the British Left's cultural arsenal, they welcomed open-ended dialogue with non-Marxist traditions. Some of this dialogue was on display in the journal Past & Present, a journal of social history that became the most prestigious in the English-speaking world. Kiernan wrote a major essay in 1952 for the first issue of the journal ("Evangelicalism and the French Revolution"), produced several landmark articles, and later served on its editorial board from 1973 to 1983. He also contributed to New Left Review throughout the journal's transitions. While Thompson, Hill and Hilton were rooted in English social history, Kiernan and Hobsbawm practised a historical craft with more global aspirations. Kiernan's distinctive contributions included the study of elites in history, the mythologies of imperialism, the folklore of capitalism and conservatism, and literature and social change.

Kiernan and Urdu poetry

While steeped in Western literature and the classical heritage of Horace, Kiernan called for an appreciation of Urdu poetry, as he translated works from its literary golden age spanning from Ghalib (1796-1869) to Iqbal (1877-1938) to Faiz (1911-1984). He elevated writers from the East who had been largely banished by guardians of the Western canon and then overlooked by stylish post-modern literary figures looking for more transgressive exemplars of literary craft.

Marriages

He was married twice: to the Indian theatre director, dancer and playwright Shanta Gandhi (Bollywood actress Dina Pathak's sister), from 1938 to 1946; and to the Canadian scholar Heather Massey, from 1984 until his death.

Selected works/articles

• The Dragon and St. George: Anglo-Chinese relations 1880-1885 (1939)
• British diplomacy in China, 1880 to 1885 (1939)
• Poems from Iqbal, Translation (1955)
• The revolution of 1854 in Spanish history (1966)
• The lords of human kind. European attitudes towards the outside world in the Imperial Age (1969)
• Marxism and imperialism: studies (1974)
• America, the new imperialism: from white settlement to world hegemony (1978)
• State & society in Europe, 1550-1650 (1980)
• European empires from conquest to collapse, 1815-1960 (1982)
• The duel in European history: honour and the reign of aristocracy (1988)
• History, classes and nation-states (edited and introduced by Harvey J. Kaye (1988)
• Tobacco: A History (1991)
• Shakespeare, poet and citizen (1993)
• Imperialism and its contradictions (edited & introduced by Harvey J. Kaye; 1995)
• Eight tragedies of Shakespeare: a Marxist study (1996)
• Colonial empires and armies 1815-1960 (1982, 1998)
• Horace: poetics and politics (1999)

See also

• History & humanism: essays in honour of V.G. Kiernan (edited by Owen Dudley Edwards; 1977)
• Across time and continents: a tribute to Victor G. Kiernan (edited by Prakash Karat; 2003). ISBN 81-87496-34-7.

References

1. Tariq Ali (20 February 2009). "Victor Kiernan: Marxist historian, writer and linguist who challenged the tenets of Imperialism". The Independent.

External links

• Obituary by Eric Hobsbawm
• Profile in The Hindu
• Obituary in The Scotsman
• Review of America, the new imperialism
• Obituary by James Dunkerley, History Workshop Journal, 69, (Spring, 2010).
• Obituary in The Times, 14 May 2009

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Victor Kiernan: Marxist historian, writer and linguist who challenged the tenets of Imperialism
by Tariq Ali
Independent.co.uk
Friday 20 February 2009 01:00



Victor Kiernan, professor emeritus of Modern History at Edinburgh University, was an erudite Marxist historian with wide-ranging interests that spanned virtually every continent. His passion for history and radical politics, classical languages and world literature was evenly divided.

His interest in languages was developed at home in south Manchester. His father worked for the Manchester Ship Canal as a translator of Spanish and Portuguese and young Victor picked these up even before getting a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, where he learnt Greek and Latin. His early love for Horace (his favourite poet) resulted in a later book. He went on to Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied History, imbibed the prevalent anti-fascist outlook and like many others joined the British Communist Party.

Unlike some of his distinguished colleagues (Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Edward Thompson) in the Communist Party Historians Group founded in 1946, Kiernan wrote a great deal on countries and cultures far removed from Britain and Europe. A flavour of the man is evident from the opening paragraphs of a 1989 essay on the monarchy published in the New Left Review:

In China an immemorial throne crumbled in 1911; India put its Rajas and Nawabs in the wastepaper-basket as soon as it gained independence in 1947; in Ethiopia the Lion of Judah has lately ceased to roar. Monarchy survives in odd corners of Asia; and in Japan and Britain. In Asia sainthood has often been hereditary, and can yield a comfortable income to remote descendants of holy men; in Europe hereditary monarchy had something of the same numinous character. In both cases a dim sense of an invisible flow of vital forces from generation to generation, linking together the endless series, has been at work. Very primitive feeling may lurk under civilized waistcoats.

Notions derived from age-old magic helped Europe's 'absolute monarchs' to convince taxpayers that a country's entire welfare, even survival, was bound up with its God-sent ruler's. Mughal emperors appeared daily on their balcony so that their subjects could see them and feel satisfied that all was well. Rajput princes would ride in a daily cavalcade through their small capitals, for the same reason. Any practical relevance of the crown to public well-being has long since vanished, but somehow in Britain the existence of a Royal Family seems to convince people in some subliminal way that everything is going to turn out all right for them... Things of today may have ancient roots; on the other hand antiques are often forgeries, and Royal sentiment in Britain today is largely an artificial product.

Kiernan's knowledge of India was first-hand. He was there from 1938-46, establishing contacts and organising study-circles with local Communists and teaching at Aitchison (formerly Chiefs) College, an institution created to educate the Indian nobility along the lines suggested by the late Lord Macaulay. What the students (mostly wooden-headed wastrels) made of Kiernan has never been revealed, but one or two of the better ones did later embrace radical ideas. It would be nice to think that he was responsible: it is hard to imagine who else it could have been. The experience taught him a great deal about imperialism and in a set of stunningly well-written books he wrote a great deal on the origins and development of the American Empire, the Spanish colonisation of South America and on other European empires.

He was by now fluent in Persian and Urdu and had met Iqbal and the young Faiz, two of the greatest poets produced by Northern India. Kiernan translated both of them into English, which played no small part in helping to enlarge their audience at a time when imperial languages were totally dominant. His interpretation of Shakespeare is much underrated but were it put on course lists it would be a healthy antidote to the embalming.

He had married the dancer and theatrical activist Shanta Gandhi in 1938 in Bombay, but they split up before Kiernan left India in 1946. Almost forty years later he married Heather Massey. When I met him soon afterwards he confessed that she had rejuvenated him intellectually. Kiernan's subsequent writings confirmed this view.

Throughout his life he stubbornly adhered to Marxist ideas, but without a trace of rigidity or sullenness. He was not one to pander to the latest fashions and despised the post-modernist wave that swept the academy in the 80s and 90s, rejecting history in favour of trivia. Angered by triumphalist mainstream commentaries proclaiming the virtues of capitalism he wrote a sharp rebuttal. "Modern Capitalism and Its Shepherds" was published once again in the New Left Review in October 1990:

Merchant capital, usurer capital, have been ubiquitous, but they have not by themselves brought about any decisive alteration of the world. It is industrial capital that has led to revolutionary change, and been the highroad to a scientific technology that has transformed agriculture as well as industry, society as well as economy. Industrial capitalism peeped out here and there before the nineteenth century, but on any considerable scale it seems to have been rejected like an alien graft, as something too unnatural to spread far. It has been a strange aberration on the human path, an abrupt mutation. Forces outside economic life were needed to establish it; only very complex, exceptional conditions could engender, or keep alive, the entrepreneurial spirit. There have always been much easier ways of making money than long-term industrial investment, the hard grind of running a factory. J.P. Morgan preferred to sit in a back parlour on Wall Street smoking cigars and playing solitaire, while money flowed towards him. The English, first to discover the industrial highroad, were soon deserting it for similar parlours in the City, or looking for byways, short cuts and colonial Eldorados.

The current crisis would not have surprised him at all. Fictive capital, I can hear him saying, has no future.

Victor Gordon Kiernan, historian and writer: born Manchester 4 September 1913; Married 1938 Shanta Gandhi (marriage dissolved 1946), 1984 Heather Massey; died 17 February 2009.

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Unite to Defend Motherland: Communist Party National Council Resolution
New Age Communist Party Weekly
Vol. X, No. 44, New Delhi, November 4, 1962
Approved for Release: 8/27/2000: CIA-RDP78-03061A000100070014-0
by Central Intelligence Agency









The National Council of the Communist Party of India, meeting in New Delhi in the present grave period of national emergency, appeals to all sections of the Indian people to unite in defence of the motherland against Chinese aggression. The Communist Party joins hands with all our patriotic people who stand behind the Prime Minister’s stirring appeal for national unity in defence of the country, says the National Council of the Communist Party of India, in its resolution entitled “National Emergency Arising Out of Chinese Aggression” adopted in New Delhi on November 1. The resolution further reads –

The National Council pays its humble tribute to the remarkable heroism of our soldiers in the face of extreme odds. The National Council salutes the memory of those sons of India who have given their precious lives for the defence of our borders.

The last few weeks have seen an unprecedented mass upsurge of our people against Chinese aggression and for the defence of the country. In various parts of the country, State and District Committees of the Communist Party have joined hands with other patriotic forces to mobilize and unite the masses for national defence.

Violation of Solemn Undertaking

In violation of the solemn undertakings given by the Chinese Government during the last three years, not to cross the McMahon Line, Chinese armed forces in large numbers have openly crossed this international frontier and are today in many places inside Indian territory. The Chinese forces have also simultaneously launched big offensives against our positions in Ladakh.

The claims which have again and again been put forward by the Chinese Government on the grounds that the McMahon Line is “illegal” because it was the result of an agreement made at a time when British imperialists ruled over India, are completely untenable and on no account can such arguments justify their launching aggression on India. The crossing of this line, under any excuse or pretence whatsoever, indisputably constitutes aggression and violation of our territory.

The National Council congratulates the members and supporters of the Communist Party who have joined the national defence efforts in large numbers and participated in different forms of patriotic action.

The National Council calls on every Party member and supporter to intensify his efforts in support of the defence of the country – in unity with all people.

The National Council extends its full support to the position taken by Prime Minister Nehru in regard to the conditions for the opening of negotiations for the settlement of the border dispute. India had all along declared its willingness and its desire to settle the border dispute by peaceful negotiations, and even today, in the face of the invasion of our territory, the Prime Minister has reiterated his willingness to negotiate with the Chinese Government, while taking all the necessary measures for the defence of the country. But such negotiations can take place obviously on the basis of the withdrawal of Chinese forces at least to the positions they held before the present aggressive actions began – that is, as the Government of India has suggested, to the positions held before September 8, 1962.

Appeal To Friendly Countries

The National Council of the Communist Party appreciates the efforts of friendly countries and Governments to end the present conflict and pave the way to negotiations. It appeals to them and to all progressive and peace-loving forces in all parts of the world to throw their weight in favour of stopping of hostilities, to secure the withdrawal of Chinese forces as proposed by the Government of India so that an atmosphere for negotiations is created.

It should now be clear to all that the continuation of this conflict disrupts Afro-Asian solidarity, weakens the common struggle against imperialism and for national independence, and threatens world peace.

While defending the sacred soil of our country from aggression, our people are conscious of the fact that a full-scale war between two such big powers of Asia is a disaster that everyone must exert his best to avoid.

Chinese Propaganda

The National Council totally rejects and repudiates the characterization made by the Chinese authorities in their press and radio propaganda, of Prime Minister Nehru as “an agent of U.S. imperialists” and the leader of “reactionaries” and an “expansionist”, and of the Government of India acting as a “tool of U.S. imperialism” in order to secure more dollar aid.

The Communist Party in its Sixth Congress at Vijayawada had already stated that the Government of India under the leadership of Nehru, is pursuing a policy of peace and non-alignment and of opposition to war and colonialism; it is not expansionist nor serving the interests of U.S. imperialism, though there have been errors in the consistent execution of such a basically correct policy.

In his broadcast to the nation, Prime Minister Nehru has reiterated that India will continue to pursue a policy of non-alignment. The Communist Parties of the world have again and again acknowledged the contribution to peace of the non-aligned countries and particularly India.

As long ago as last December, our late General Secretary Ajoy Ghosh publicly repudiated the wrong Chinese understanding of the character of the Indian Government and the policies pursued by it.

The National Council of the Communist Party of India never expected a socialist country like China to settle a border dispute with India by force of arms, and make astounding claims against a country which is engaged in peaceful consolidation of its newly-won independence, which belongs to the peace camp, which follows a foreign policy of non-alignment, which has all along maintained friendship with China, and whose Government is run by a parliamentary democracy and not a military dictatorship.

By its wrong and mistaken attitude, the Chinese Government has facilitated the strengthening of the Right-wing reactionary parties and groups in this country, strengthening of the opponents of non-alignment. The result of Chinese aggression has been to give a tremendous fillip precisely to these forces.

Reaction’s Game

These reactionary forces seek to take advantage of the situation created by the Chinese aggression, to make India give up its policy of non-alignment, foment war hysteria and drag India into the imperialist camp. To this end, they are spreading panicky rumours and slanders to discredit the defence administration and leadership; they are openly accusing the Government and the Prime Minister of ‘appeasement’ and ‘vacillation’ and calling for a total reversal of foreign policy.

The Communist Party of India stands for the strengthening and building of the unity of all patriotic forces in this national emergency. The Communist Party of India is not opposed to buying arms from any country on a commercial basis. But it is opposed to the import of foreign personnel to man the defences of this country. The people and armed forces of India are capable enough to defend their country once they organize and move in their millions as a solid united force. Supreme efforts both by the Government and people will have to be made in this direction.

PM’s Call Responded

The people have responded splendidly to the call of the Prime Minister for united national effort, for stepping up production, mobilizing funds for the armed forces, etc.

The Communist Party pledges itself to participate fully in all activities for the promotion of national unity, defence and the strengthening of the morals of the people.

In this situation, the National Council draws the attention of all to the warnings given in the Prime Minister’s Appeal against anti-national vested interests who will try to profit by raising prices or hoarding, etc. The Council hopes that the Central and State Governments will take stern measures against the vested interests, who, as past experience shows, utilize such situations of national and international crises to enrich themselves at the cost¬ of the toiling people, to the detriment of the defence of the country.

Revoke Anti-People Measures

The great common mass of toiling people, who already live in poverty but who by their labour on land and in factories will be working in the rear to fulfil the needs of production, also need to be protected against the anti-social vested interests.

While sharing the tasks of the defence of the country, the people want to be assured that all the burdens of defence are not cast on the poor toiling people. Hence the Council hopes that those unpopular measures which have been on the anvil of the legislatures are set aside and the defence efforts are so organized¬ as to enthuse the mass of people and unite them for greater voluntary sacrifices for the defence of the country.

China’s Astounding Claims

The Council notes that reactionary elements in the country are trying to misuse popular indignation against Chinese aggression to rouse felings against the Communist Party of India. In the present situation, this amounts to nothing but national disruption and defiance of the Prime Minister’s call for national unity. The Council is confident that the patriotic and democratic forces in the country will give a fitting rebuff to all such attempts.

The Council calls on Communist Party units, members and supporters everywhere:

• To take an active part in the work of the popular committees which are being set up in support of the defence efforts;
• To exert their best to build up the National Defence Fund;
• To work resolutely for increase in production for defence and people’s needs;
• To mobilize public opinion against price rises, blackmarketing and profiteering and other anti-social activities, which hit the working people and the nation;
• To campaign tirelessly against those groups, parties and elements which seek narrow political advantage out of the present crisis;
• To oppose attempts to force India to give up her foreign policy of non-alignment and peace and thereby put her at the mercy of the imperialist camp and involve India in a prolonged full-scale war;
• To support all moves taken by the Government of India to bring about a peaceful settlement, consistent with the honour and dignity of the country.
The National Council is confident that all Communists will stand at their posts of duty and work, together with the rest of the Indian people, to the greater glory of the Motherland.

***

“In the Interest of Peoples, For the Sake of Universal Peace”

Text of Pravda Editorial

Moscow, October 25:

The following is the full text of Pravda editorial entitled “In the Interests of the Peoples, For the Sake of Universal Peace”, published today:

The Soviet Union and the other socialist countries regard it as the chief aims of their foreign policy the ensuring of peaceful conditions for the construction of a new society and for the development of the world socialist system, consolidation of friendship among all peoples, and the ridding of mankind from the threat of a new world war.

This position is consistently adhered to by the Soviet Union and countries of the socialist community in settling all world policy problems. Counterposing to imperialism the new type of international relations, the socialist states persistently and purposefully uphold the principles of freedom, national independence, sovereignty and the possibility for the people of every country to decide their destiny. The countries of the socialist camp act as genuine friends and allies of the peoples in their struggle against colonialism and the intrigues of the imperialist powers.

The young sovereign states have inherited many unsolved problems from the grievous past. The imperialist quarters never miss an opportunity of taking advantage of difficulties connected, specifically, with all kinds of border issues and disputes. In their aggressive aspirations U.S. imperialism and its allies in NATO, SEATO and other military blocs pin special hopes on exploiting the unsettled border issue between the People’s Republic of China and India.

The question of the Sino-Indian border is a legacy of the times when the British colonialists held sway on Indian territory, arbitrarily cutting and recutting the map of Asia.

The notorious McMahon Line, which has never been recognized by China, was imposed upon the Chinese and Indian peoples. The imperialist quarters did their utmost to use border conflicts connected with this line for provoking an armed clash. The imperialists dream of setting these great powers against each other, and also of undermining the Soviet Union’s friendship both with fraternal China and with friendly India.

The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China are bound by many years of unbreakable friendship. This friendship rests on the community of aims: the building of socialism and communism, its firm foundation is constituted by a uniform economic base, a uniform political system, a common ideology – Marxism-Leninism. The Soviet Union, China, and all the countries of socialism are at one in the struggle against imperialism, for peace all over the world. The joint forces of the socialist camp reliably guarantee every socialist country against encroachments by imperialist reaction. When four years ago, in 1958, the Chiang Kai-shek clique started, in collusion with U.S. military, provocative activities in the Taiwan Strait, the Soviet Government sternly warned the fanciers of playing with fire, stressing that in the struggle against the intrigues of imperialism the Soviet Union was fully on the side of great fraternal China. This warning was confirmed by the head of the Soviet Government, N.S. Khrushchev, in his radio and TV address on July 2, 1962.

Profound satisfaction is aroused in Soviet people by the development of the Soviet Unions’ cooperation with India. We rejoice over the successes of the Indian people, we understand their difficulties and readily broaden our cooperation which helps develop the economy and culture of the country which has cast off the colonial yoke. Soviet people highly appreciate sovereign India’s contribution to the struggle for peace and international security, against colonialism and imperialist military blocs.

Soviet People Are Worried

Soviet people, as all peace-loving public, are worried by the development of events on the Indian-Chinese border, especially in the recent period, when things came to armed clashes. Such a development does not accord with the spirit of relations existing between China and India. It runs counter to the national interests of both states. Aggravation of relations between China and India is only profitable to the common enemy of these states, international imperialism.

The Soviet Government and the Soviet people have always advocated the peaceful adjustment of this frontier dispute through negotiation. All lovers of peace adopt this view. There is no question that they will be gratified to see the new move which the Chinese Government has taken to peacefully settle its dispute with India. This is the statement issued by the Government of the People’s Republic of China, the full text of which is published in today’s Pravda.

“It is absolutely impossible to imagine the solution of the question of the Chinese-Indian border with the help of armed force,” the statement says. “China and India are two major Asian countries and they bear great responsibility for peace in Asia and the world generally. They initiated the five principles of peaceful coexistence and took part in the Bandung Conference. And though present Sino-Indian relations are rather strained there is still no reason to jettison the five principles and the Bandung spirit.”

The Chinese Government has suggested embarking on negotiations to settle the question of the Sino-Indian frontier. It has expressed the hope that the Indian Government will be agreeable to having both sides respect the line between territories actually controlled by both sides along the entire Sino-Indian frontier and, to avoid contact, will withdraw their armed forces to within 20 kilometres distance. The Chinese Government believes that there should be another meeting between the Chinese and Indian Prime Ministers at a reciprocally suitable moment.

The Chinese Government has called on the Indian Government to energetically respond to its proposals. It has urged the Afro-Asian governments to exert an effort to facilitate their realization. It has likewise called on all the peace-loving countries and peoples to bend their efforts to promote Sino-Indian friendship, Afro-Asian solidarity and world peace.

The fomentation of the conflict between the two great Asian powers brings grist to the mill not only of imperialism in general but also of certain reactionary circles inside India, most intimately associated with foreign capital and imperialist forces inimical to the Indian people. To adjust the conflict peacefully India’s progressives must redouble their efforts. One, of course, must realize that when relations are strained as they are now, even some progressively minded people may succumb to nationalism and become jingoists. However, one cannot do that, when questions of the struggle for peace, of the solution of international issues, are at stake. In this case, one must be an internationalist and strive not to fan animosity and exacerbate the conflict but settle it peacefully through negotiation. Of course, there can be misunderstandings in relations between states. But it is imperative from the point of view of plain common sense to show good-will on both sides and not dictate any preliminary terms when adjusting disputes.

As for the Soviet people, they take the Chinese Government’s statement as an expression of its sincere concern for its relations with India and of its desire to end the conflict. We think the Chinese Government’s proposals constructive. Without impairing the prestige of either side, they provide an acceptable groundwork for starting negotiations and for peacefully settling controversies in a way taking account of the interests of both the People’s Republic of China and India.

Together Against Imperialism

A friendly settlement of the Sino-Indian frontier problem would once again demonstrate the great power of the principles of the peaceful co-existence and cooperation of states with different systems. It would also promote the traditional friendship between the Chinese and Indian peoples and largely facilitate the consolidation of international security in Asia and the world generally. Further, it would strike a fresh blow at the forces of imperialism and colonialism and against the machinations of the aggressive quarters of the U.S., who in the last few days have embarked upon an extremely perilous venture, which is directed not only against Cuba and the socialist states but against all lovers of peace in general.

***

Yemen Republic Victorious

The Yemeni Premier Abdallah al Sallal told a Cairo correspondent on October 27 that the Republican Government of the Yemen had been able, in the month since the beginning of the revolution, to put down the unrest provoked in the frontier regions by King Saud, King Hussein and the ruler of Beihan.

“Now”, he said, “we are dedicating all our efforts to the economic advance of Yemen. We hoped to set about doing this from the very first day of the revolution, but the conspiracies of our enemies hampered us. Of course, the defeat which Saud, Hussein and the Beihan ruler sustained, will not stop them. They will continue sending their mercenaries, arms and gold to Jauf and Marib regions in order to provoke unrest. That is why we shall continue enhancing our vigilance.”

”Our government”, Abdallah al Sallal said, “has already drafted an economic programme. It has been submitted to an economic conference now taking place at Sanaa. Above all, we must set up a central bank. We have also started various agricultural reforms. Above all, we must enlarge cotton crops and new markets for our farm produce. We shall try to obtain loans from various countries since the treasury had been empty at the time of the revolution. We shall invite specialists from the whole world and ask for their help.”

Meanwhile, MEN Agency correspondent from Marib reports that after bitter fighting, troops of the revolutionary Government of Yemen captured a height dominating Marib. In the course of the engagement, which lasted an hour, 170 rebels were killed and wounded and 100 others were taken prisoner.

Yemen aircraft discovered and strafed mercenary forces near the road between Marib and the British Protectorate of Beihan.

The Al Ahram correspondent reports from Sanaa that Yemen revolutionary troops have blocked another attempt by mercenaries to enter Yemen from the North-East.

***

Supplement to WPC Bulletin 10

Stop Press News on Cuba – 24 October 1962

Think – Act – Before It is Too Late

The peoples’ will to peace must halt US Cuba blockade and safeguard peace

Message to the Chairman of the UN Security Council from Professor J.D. Bernal
Chairman of the WCP Presidential Committee

In this house, when the outbreak of world war has never been so imminent, I address through you the members of the Security Council in the name of the hundreds of millions throughout the world who have steadily supported the cause of peace.

The orders given to the US Navy to stop and search all shipping to Cuba are completely illegal. Their implementation would be equivalent to a blockade. The military measures which accompany them are provocative and highly dangerous to peace.

The reasons alleged for these orders are totally irrelevant at a time when no city in the whole world is out of range of nuclear ballistic missiles. As to the proximity of the alleged missile bases in Cuba to the United States providing any justification for these actions, the Soviet Union and other Socialist countries have been ringed for years with nuclear bases round their frontiers without producing the hysterical military reaction which the US Government is now exhibiting. The other actions ordered by President Kennedy, particularly the intense military build up, cannot fail to be seen also as preparation for an invasion of Cuba.

Nevertheless, the US Government is actually asking the Security Council to justify its actions and even to reinforce them. We earnestly hope you will reject this motion and demand instead the calling off of the blockade and the military threats which accompany it. Only in an atmosphere free from such tension and incitement can the whole question of Cuba be dealt with by the United Nations so as to secure the right of its people to govern themselves free from blockade and threats of intervention.

The United Nations can only vindicate its original purpose of preserving peace by acting now to avert the gravest threat it has faced since its creation and save the world from the horror of nuclear war.

***

ACTION – ACTION – ACTION

TELEGRAM
from Juan Marinello, President of the Cuban Movement for Peace and Sovereignty of the Peoples

In the face of imminent war danger provoked by the aggressive statement of President Kennedy ordering the Naval blockade of Cuba, we most urgently request appeal of world peace forces to urge new public condemnation of war-provoking actions by US Government, the sending without delay of messages to UNO and organization of powerful national movements in support of the cause of Cuba which is the cause of peace based on the respect and sovereignty of nations.

USA

Eight hundred American women of Women Strike for Peace gathered in front of the UNO buildings in New York and demanded the immediate withdrawal of the blockade measures announced by President Kennedy. They shouted slogans and carried banners saying: Take care President Kennedy! Blockage leads to war!

Youth too demonstrated before the UN buildings shouting: Give up the blockade! To prevent world war – negotiations not provocations!

There were protest demonstrations as well in Berkeley (California) and Columbus (Ohio) at which youth and students protested against the Government announcement. In Columbus the demonstrators adopted a statement declaring the blockade an act of war and stating that the safety, not only of the United States, but also of the whole world is threatened by these measures.

Brazil and Argentina

The trade-unions of Latin America’s largest country, Brazil, have expressed their indignation at this “attack on the right to self-determination of a small people” and have declared their solidarity with the Cuban people. The Argentine trade-unions stated in a telegram to UNO: “The Cuban people is sovereign and has the right to shape its life independently and to take measures in its own defence. The war danger originates, not from Cuba, but from the USA which does not wish to respect this right”.

Great Britain

Action in support of Cuba has already started in Britain. Two thousand people demonstrated in front of the US Embassy. They broke through police cordons and 126 were arrested. Other demonstrations took place in Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester and Bristol. The British Peace Committee is calling a protest march through Central London on Saturday 27 October; the Hands off Cuba Committee has called a meeting for Saturday afternoon in Hyde Park and the CND will protest on Sunday with a public meeting in St. Pancras Town Hall.

The British Peace Committee issued a statement on 23 October and published a second one the following day to convene the Saturday march.

In a telegram to Premier Macmillan the Executive Committee of the South Wales branch of the National Union of Minors states that the British Government must not support the action of the United States against Cuba. The Executive Committee points to the necessity of removing all foreign bases and withdrawing all troops from foreign territories. The pursual of the present course of the US Government, the telegram states, will finally lead to war.

France

Throughout the whole day on 23 October, deputations from all districts of Paris and the outlying towns flocked to the United States Embassy in Paris to protest against the measures decided on by President Kennedy against Cuba.

The National Council of the Peace Movement sent a telegram to the French delegation at the UN Security Council. It also sent the following telegram to the Security Council itself:

“To the Security Council of the United Nations Organisation.

“Cuban blockade by the USA creates situation dangerous to peace. Demand withdrawal war measures decided by Kennedy and condemnation by Security Council of decision which could lead to nuclear war. Urge you reaffirm right of peoples for free choice of destiny.”

-- French Peace Movement

Italy

The Presiding Committee and the Secretariat of the Italian Peace Committee, at an emergency meeting following the very grave situation brought about by the US initiative taken on the night 22-23 October, condemned the acute danger to world peace of such an action. The United States, with its military bases and rocket stock-piles stationed in all areas of the world, in Italy and even in Cuba itself, has deliberately created a threat and launched a challenge directed, not only against Cuba and the Soviet Union, but also against the whole world by taking military measures, violating all norms of international law and defying outright the principle of the sovereignty of the peoples it states.

In the face of this extremely grave threat, all the peoples must act to defend peace.

The Italian Peace Committee considers it essential to impel the Italian Government to take a clear and firm stand without delay on the situation. The Government must refuse to submit to such an irresponsible military blackmail; it must take action in all possible fields to re-establish peace and law and give assurance that no Italian territory whatever be used to support in any way, directly or indirectly, the US action and that in no case Italian military units be engaged as a possible consequence of the insane threat.

As soon as President Kennedy’s speech had become known there were impressive demonstrations in the big cities of Italy. In Rome, thousands demonstrated shouting “Hands off Cuba!”. Similar demonstrations took place in Milan, Genoa, Turin, Forli, Bologna, etc. The people of Italy are demanding that their Government take effective measures to safeguard peace.

Many leading politicians and intellectuals have made statements in support of the freedom and independence of the Cuban people.

Belgium

The President of the Belgian Senate, Paul Struyo, declared that there was not the slightest legal ground which would allow US to threaten ships en route for Cuba. Paul Struyo stressed that these measures announced by the USA were contrary to international law.

Sweden

In neutral Sweden, the leading newspaper Stockholms Tidningen has condemned US action on the grounds that the blockade could bring with it the most grave consequences for world peace and that in any case the already tense international situation will be seriously worsened.

World Council of Churches

The World Council of Churches, which represents protestant, orthodox and Anglican churches from 53 countries, has published a statement in Geneva condemning the act of aggression by the USA against Cuba. In its statement it declares that the World Council of Churches regards it as its duty to express its grave concern and regret at the measure which the United States Government has taken against Cuba.

***

Excerpts from the Soviet Government Statement

“… In this hour of grave anxiety the Soviet Union considers it its duty to direct a most solemn warning to the Government of the USA that, with the implementation of the measures announced by President Kennedy, the US Government would be taking upon its shoulders a grave responsibility for the fate of peace and would be playing an insane game with fire …

“… The Soviet Union has always remained true to the principles of the United Nations Charter; it has consistently followed, and will continue to follow, a policy aimed at maintaining and strengthening peace. The whole world knows what colossal efforts the Soviet Union makes to achieve the relaxation of international tension, the elimination of focal points of conflict and strife between states, the implementation of the principles of peaceful coexistence between states with various social systems. It was the Soviet Union that developed and founded the programme of general and complete disarmament, the achievement of which would open up real prospects for a world without war, a world without weapons.

“… These proposals meet with ever increasing support throughout the world; they have captured the imagination of men and have become the order of the day …

“… The US Government accuses Cuba of creating a danger for the security of the United States. But who will believe that Cuba could constitute a danger for the USA? On considering the size and the resources of both countries, of their armaments, it could not occur to any rational-minded statesman to imagine that Cuba could represent a danger to the United States of America or any other country…

“… Is it not convincing that the Cuban Government has officially stated that it wanted to settle all outstanding problems with the US Government by negotiations? …

“As for Soviet help for Cuba, this serves the sole aim of strengthening Cuba’s defence capacity…

“… If the USA today attempts to prohibit other countries from trading with Cuba and using their ships to carry goods and freight to Cuba, then leading circles of the USA could tomorrow demand similar measures against any other state whose policy or social system does not meet with the approval of ruling US circles …

“… The Soviet Government decisively rejects such claims. The crass actions of US imperialists could lead to catastrophic results for the whole of mankind, and no peoples in the world, including those of the USA, want this…

“… The Soviet Union appeals to all governments and peoples to protest against the aggressive actions of the United States of America against Cuba and other countries, resolutely to condemn these actions and to prevent the US Government from unleashing a nuclear war…”

(Unofficial translation)

***

The London Times on 10 October published a letter from certain eminent British personalities on the question of Cuba. Following are extracts:

“The American calls for armed aggression against Cuba are so strident, the justifications given for it so unconvincing to reasonable people outside the United States, that it is tempting to dismiss them…”

“It may, therefore, be as well,” continues the letter, “to state what we believe to be the feeling of the great majority of Britons. Whatever we think of Fidel Castro, we have no sympathy for the hectoring of a small country by a great power. We find the American arguments for intervention unacceptable. We do not believe that any good can come to world peace, or, for that matter, to America’s standing in the world (and especially Latin America), from intervention in Cuba. Finally, we would strongly oppose any attempt by the United States to involve this country by asking British ships to participate in a blockade or by requesting any other interference with the normal peaceful relations between states…”

Signed:

Robert Bolt; George Devine; Penelope Gillialt; Willis Hall; Richard Hoggart; Paul Johnson; Christopher Logue; Louis Mae Neice; John Osborne; J.B. Priestley; Herbert Read; Philip Toynbee; Kenneth Tynan; Anthony Wedgwood Benn; Arnold Wesker.

3 October

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Eigentumer, Herausgeber und Verieger; Gazzetta Zeitschriften Ges. m. b. H. Fur den Inhalt verantwortlicht: Dr. Heinz Bodner, samtliche Wien IV, Mollwaldplatz 5 Erschelnungsort Wien, Verlagspostamt 50 – Druk: Globus, Wien XX, Hochtstodtplatz 3