Dave Sherry Knihy

Workplace occupations have reappeared over the last year in response to the economic crisis. Groups of workers have refused to let their factories and jobs go without a fight. Today's movement can learn from a century of experience. Dave Sherry looks at waves of occupations and sit-ins from Italy 1920, France 1936 and 1968, to the US car workers in Flint and Britain's own tradition from the Upper Clyde shipbuilders to the women at Lee Jeans. This short, accessible history.

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

When women workers' anger exploded onto the streets of Petrograd on International Women's Day in 1917, it lit a fuse that was to turn the world upside down. It sparked the toppling of the Tsarist autocracy and three other global empires and speed the end of the First World War. The women and soldiers of Petrograd were the vanguard of the most important and the most successful social movement in world history. The 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution gives socialists the world over the chance to rediscover these momentous events, which have inspired generations of workers.