Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions - Softcover

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was the founding leader, along with Frederick Engels, of the modern revolutionary workers movement. Together with Engels he drafted the Communist Manifesto, the program of that movement. A founder of the Communist League (1848–52), Marx played a prominent role in the 1848–49 revolution in Germany. He was the founding leader of the General Council of the International bout the authors Working Men’s Association (1864–76), often called the First International. The writings of Marx and Engels have provided the political foundation for the actions of proletarian revolutionists worldwide for more than a century and a half. Farrell Dobbs (1909–1983), national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party from 1953 to 1972, emerged from the ranks of the Teamsters as a central leader of battles that transformed the union movement during the Great Depression. He was a leader of the 1934 strikes that made Minneapolis a union town and of the organizing drives that brought a quarter million over-the-road truck drivers into the Teamsters union across the Midwest and Mid- South. During World War II, he and other class-struggle leaders organizing union opposition to Washington’s war aims were railroaded to federal prison by the US imperialist rulers. Dobbs resigned as general organizer on the Teamster national staff in 1940 to become labor secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. He was the SWP presidential candidate four times. Jack Barnes is national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. He has been a member of the party’s National Committee since 1963 and a national officer since 1969. Barnes spent the summer of 1960 in Cuba and joined the SWP and Young Socialist Alliance on his return, taking on central leadership of the party’s work in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In 1965 he met twice with Malcolm X for an interview published in the Young Socialist magazine. Since the mid-1970s Barnes has led the political course of the SWP and its sister parties world wide to build communist parties the large majority of whose members and leaders are workers and trade unionists engaged in activity advancing the mobilization of the working class and its allies toward the revolutionary conquest of state power.