Between 18, industrial production grew by more than 75 percent. Kruger sets the stage with discussion of the trends of industrial development and its depressions, the poverty and oppression of the working class, the vileness and corruption of the rich, and the growth of the massive railroad industry.Īmerican capitalism entered into unprecedented expansion. Out of the destruction of chattel slavery in the Civil War a new era emerged. It should find a working class audience at a time when socialism’s popularity is on the rise, capitalism is increasingly becoming a dirty word, and with the first strike wave in decades gathering force, uncorked by the COVID pandemic and the ruling class’s criminal profit-over-lives policy which has killed over 800,000 people in the United States and millions across the world.
Kruger’s success is placing it within this broader context: the 1848 revolutions in Europe, the First International and the Paris Commune, all of which had profound influence on American politics and society. The American working class, though ethnically and racially diverse, bitterly fought to raise its living standards, and for basic workplace rights, against the bourgeoisie.īut the Commune cannot be entirely understood separated from the international influence of socialism and the revolutionary uprisings of the mid-19th century. Just one decade after the Civil War, socialism found fertile soil in America as workers were thrown into massive, and often bloody, struggle against the capitalists. Kruger’s book is a rebuke against the most basic lie of American history: that there has been no class struggle or socialism in the United States. The entire strike wave was covered by Robert Bruce in 1877: Year of Violence (1959) and Philip Foner in The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (1977). Louis Commune since David Burbank’s Reign of the Rabble, published in 1966, a meticulous blow-by-blow narrative. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland, written by Mark Kruger, a retired professor who lives in the city. This rich history is found in a new book on the subject, The St. Its scope and spontaneity rocked the very foundations of capitalist rule and ushered in a new epoch, with the working class stepping forward as a powerful force.
Ruthless wage cuts, unsafe working conditions, and unprecedented inequality triggered the uprising, which swept across the United States, coast to coast. Louis Commune of 1877 formed the revolutionary center of gravity of the spontaneous Great Railroad Strike, which started at the beginning of July and ended in September 1877. Louis workers elected an Executive Committee to direct the functions of government and oversee the economy for a brief day or two until the leadership vacillated and caved in the face of capitalist repression. Led by the Workingmen’s Party of the United States (WP), a descendant of the First International, St. Louis launched a general strike and seized power in the city, establishing a short-lived proletarian dictatorship. One of the most revolutionary events in American history is also one of the least known: In July 1877, the working class in St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland, by Mark Kruger.
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