James Larkin, born on this day in 1874, was an Irish republican, revolutionary socialist, and trade unionist who co-founded the industrial Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), the Irish Labour Party, and the Irish Citizen’s Army (ICA).

Larkin, also known as “Big Jim”, was born to Irish emigrants and began working from the age of seven years old. He took an interest in socialism at a young age, joining the Independent Labour Party as a teenager.

In 1905, while working on the docks, Larkin participated in a strike and was elected to the strike committee, losing his foreman’s job as a result. The union was impressed with his organizing ability, and he later gained a permanent position with them, beginning his career as a labor organizer.

In 1908, Larkin began organizing in Dublin, working with other Irish socialists such as James Connolly and William O’Brien. He also initiated a worker’s newspaper, The Irish Worker and People’s Advocate, however it was subject to censorship and shut down in 1915.

In 1908, Larkin founded the industrial Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU). Under Larkin’s leadership the union continued to grow, reaching approximately 20,000 members in the time leading up to the Dublin lock-out.

In 1913, led by union busting capitalist William Martin Murphy, over 400 of Dublin’s employers began requiring their workers to sign a pledge not to be a member of the ITGWU and not to engage in sympathetic strikes, causing the Dublin lock-out, one of the most severe labor conflicts in Irish history.

Larkin and other labor leaders were arrested for sedition on August 28th while the lock-out continued. Striking workers were subject to police violence, leading Larkin to call for the formation of a workers’ militia, the Irish Citizen’s Army. During this period, Vladimir Lenin referred to Larkin as ‘a remarkable speaker and a man of seething energy [who] has performed miracles amongst the unskilled workers’.

Following the lock-out’s defeat, Larkin came to the United States to do a speaking tour on invitation of “Big Bill” Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). On November 7th, 1919, during a series of anti-Bolshevik raids, Larkin was arrested and charged with ‘criminal anarchy’ for helping publish socialist literature.

Larkin eventually returned to Ireland, allying with the newly formed Soviet Union, attending at the 1924 Comintern Congress in Moscow. His relationship with the Soviet Union became strained in the 1930s, as Larkin’s syndicalist politics clashed with the Marxism-Leninism of the Comintern.

Larkin spent the rest of his life as a organizer, receiving fatal injuries from a fall while supervising repairs to the Worker’s Union of Ireland’s Thomas Ashe Hall in Dublin in 1946.

“No, men and women of the Irish race, we shall not fight for England. We shall fight for the destruction of the British Empire and the construction of an Irish republic.”

• James Larkin

Christy Moore - Balled of James Larkin (1969) :ira:

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