bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pouget, Émile (1860–1931)
Authors: Bantman Constance
Published: September 2017

Émile Pouget was a key figure of French and international anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism between 1880 and 1914, one of the most vocal militants and cunning strategists, a prolific journalist and pamphlet‐writer whose career spans three decades. He came from an impoverished middle‐class family from Aveyron. By the late 1870s he had moved to Paris and formed a shopkeepers' union, although he did not become a wholehearted advocate of revolutionary trade unionism until the early 1890s. In 1883 he was imprisoned for leading a demonstration of unemployed workers with Louise Michel at the Invalides, which degenerated into riot and looting. It was on this occasion that the anarchist black flag is believed to have appeared for the first time. In 1886 he set up
Le Père peinard
, a fiercely anti‐bourgeois, pro‐strikes, and anti‐colonial paper addressed to the worker, famous for its biting slang and artistic contributions.
POUM
(Workers' Party of Marxist Unification)
Authors: Durgan Andrew
Published: September 2017

The Spanish Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) (POUM) was the most important of the dissident communist groupings that emerged internationally in the 1930s in opposition to Stalinism. It played a leading role in the Spanish Revolution of 1936–7 before becoming victim of the Soviet government's first intervention against a foreign revolution
P
rabhakaran,
V
elupillai (b. 1954)
Authors: Rainford Charan
Published: September 2017

Velupillai Prabhakaran is the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the foremost rebel organization seeking
Eelam
or an independent homeland for the Sri Lankan Tamils. He was born on November 26, 1954 in Jaffna, Sri Lanka as the fourth child to T. Velupillai and V. Parvathi, a well‐respected family in the coastal village of Velvettiturai. Velupillai was a clerk and district land officer. By dint of his father's occupation, Prabhakaran's early schooling was in the Eastern town of Batticaloa, and later in Jaffna. He was said to be a studious boy and a loner by nature. In 1958, during the first major anti‐Tamil riots, he witnessed a Hindu temple priest caught and burnt to death by a rampaging Sinhalese mob.
P
rague
S
pring
Authors: Williams Kieran
Published: September 2017

The upheaval in Czechoslovakia in the second half of the 1960s conventionally referred to as the Prague Spring was one of the greatest challenges to the Soviet model of political economy and social control. The centerpiece of this challenge was an effort by the ruling Communist Party (Komuni‐stická strana Československa, KSČ) to combat growing disaffection by relaxing the limits on speech and association, curtailing surveillance by the secret police, introducing market elements into the planned economy, federalizing the unitary state to put relations between the two constituent nations (the Czechs and the less numerous Slovaks) on a more equal footing, and preparing the KSČ for semi‐competitive elections. Alongside the official efforts, ferment in universities, trade unions, and intellectual circles exceeded the bounds set by the KSČ and greatly alarmed the Soviet Union, which led an invasion in August 1968 to restore Leninist orthodoxy. The ensuing week of non‐violent civil resistance to that invasion is also an important part of this episode.
P
rasertkul,
S
eksan (b. 1949)
Authors: Rousset Pierre
Published: September 2017

Seksan Prasertkun (or Prasertkul) was among the most visible student leaders in the demonstrations of October 1973 that toppled the Thai military regime. He was also among the first groups who joined the fighters of the Communist Party of Thailand when it became clear that a new coup d'etat was underway. He was one of the militants who actively opposed CPT leadership support for the People's Republic of China and the Khmer Rouge during the Sino Indochinese conflict of 1978–9. After losing this ideological campaign in the Thai communist movement, Seksan permanently returned to civilian life. Marcel Barang, who translated many of Seksan's writings, summarized his exceptional journey in one sentence: “Child of the poor, great student speaker, outcast underground fighter, highly quoted professor, renowned writer, witness and actor of his century.” In this way he became an emblematic figure of the radical generation of the 1970s.
Prince Edward
I
sland Protests, 1830s
Authors: Bent David L.
Published: September 2017

In the 1830s the tiny British colony of Prince Edward Island (PEI) was racked by protest. This protest, known as the Escheat movement, was dedicated to overhauling the colony's system of land ownership in favor of Island residents. The threat of armed rebellion hovered over the movement, but it was primarily a political protest. While it enjoyed strong support at the ballot box, it failed to realize its goals, although it provided PEI with an enduring culture of popular protest.
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (1809–1865)
Authors: Prichard Alex
Published: September 2017

The influence of the anarchist writer and political philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon on his times, and his importance within and for understanding the two centuries since his birth, has been the subject of major controversy, due to three main features of his life and writings. First, Proudhon was the first to openly declare himself as an anarchist and to articulate precisely what he meant by this. Second, Proudhon's own descriptions and opinions changed and evolved. Third, the sheer novelty of his thinking may have made him difficult to understand. As Alexander Herzen, one of the most preeminent Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth century and a comrade of Proudhon's, once wrote: “The French seek experimental solutions in him, and, finding no plans for the phalanstery nor for the Icarian community, shrug their shoulders and lay the book aside … Proudhon is the first of a new set of thinkers. His work marks a transition period, not only in the history of socialism, but also in the history of French logic.”
Provos Revolt
Authors: Grindon Gavin
Published: September 2017

Not to be confused with the Irish paramilitary organization, the Dutch Provos were founded by theorist Roel Van Duijn, designer Luud Schimmelpennink, anarchist Rob Stolk, and artist Robert Jasper Grootveld in July 1965. Their name came from Van Duijn's
Provo
magazine, which adopted as a positive title the negative term for rioting urban youth coined by Dutch social psychologist Wouter Buikhuisen (Van Elteren 1994: 127). “Provo” was short for provocateurs: the group employed ironic, playful art‐happenings and hoaxes which were intended to provoke authority to reveal its essentially repressive character. Their model of activism was influential internationally for 1960s groups such as the Yippies and Diggers, and can still be felt in the theatrical activism of more recent groups in the global justice movement such as Reclaim the Streets.
Quit
I
ndia Movement
Authors: Chattopadhyay Kunal
Published: September 2017

In 1935 the Government of India Act was promulgated by Britain and elections were held in 1937. The Indian National Congress, the dominant nationalist party, won a majority of provinces. The Congress victory emboldened the masses, who fought militantly for greater equality and redistribution of resources. But the Congress right wing, linked closely to Indian capitalists, quickly established dominance in the organization and the governments. The leftwing leader Subhas Chandra Bose was eventually pushed out of the party and formed the Forward Bloc (FB), a small political organization. In view of Congress's compromise with the British colonialists to restrain struggles, and its periodic complicity in repressive policies, the party's popularity began to fall, its membership declining from 4.5 million in 1938–9 to 1.4 million in 1940–1.
R
abuka,
S
itiveni
L
igamamada (b. 1948)
Authors: Corfield Justin
Published: September 2017

Lieutenant Colonel Rabuka, the Fijian military commander who led the May 14, 1987 effort which brought down the government of Dr. Timoci Bavadra, staged a second coup on september 25, 1987, resulting in Fiji becoming a republic the following year.
Reclaim the Streets
Authors: Jordan John
Published: September 2017

Merging the radical ecology of Britain's powerful anti‐road‐building movement and the carni‐valesque nature of the countercultural rave scene of the early 1990s, Reclaim the Streets (RTS) became a catalyst for the global anti‐capitalist movements that came to light during the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) protests of 1999. Combining a radical ecological and social critique with creative forms of direct action and a dedication to non‐hierarchical organization, the group's innovative tactics inspired a new generation of radical activists in the global North.
Reclus, Elisée (1830–1905)
Authors: Pauli Benjamin J.
Published: September 2017

Perhaps the most important figure in French anarchism after Proudhon, Elisée Reclus made significant contributions to anarchist theory and practice in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Reclus was born in 1830 in the village of sainte‐Foy‐la‐Grande in southwest France. As the son of a pastor, he received a Protestant education and upbringing, and the Christian values he was imbued with at an early age colored his thinking for the rest of his life. Reclus went to school in sainte‐Foy and Montauban in France and attended a Moravian school in Neuwied, Germany, where he also taught. Nominally a theology student, Reclus in fact gravitated toward the sciences. During his term at the University of Berlin in 1851 he attended lectures given by the renowned geographer Carl Ritter, which sparked what would become a lifelong passion for geography.
Regina Riot
Authors: Bent David L.
Published: September 2017

The Regina Riot took place in the capital city of saskatchewan on Dominion Day, July 1, 1935. The confrontation between striking relief camp workers and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) was the culmination of the On‐to‐Ottawa Trek, a protest that was intended to travel from Vancouver to Ottawa to carry the grievances of the unemployment relief camp workers to the federal government.
Reichstag Fire of 1933
Authors: Schmidt Ingo
Published: September 2017

On January 30, 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed as chancellor of the Weimar Republic. On February 27, 1933, in the midst of an election campaign, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, went up in flames. The next day, a decree on the Protection of the People and the state declared a state of emergency that suspended most civil rights (Kühnl 1987: 193–4). By the end of March, the Enabling Act (Kühnl 1987: 196) transferred all decision‐making power from parliament to the government. In July the National socialist German Workers' Party (NsDAP) was declared the only legal party in Germany (Kühnl 1987: 200–1). Within a few months, the Weimar Republic had given way to the Third Reich. The Reichstag Fire was a turning point in the transformation of a representative democracy into a terrorist dictatorship.
Reprise Individuelle
Authors: Nematollahy Ali
Published: September 2017

From its first manifestations in the late 1880s, the phenomenon of
reprise individuelle –
“individual reclamation” – or the act of theft conceived as a “reappropriation” of wealth by individuals who have been “robbed” by the governing classes, took leftist intellectuals by surprise. Its practice always remained ahead of theory, and except for the brothers Reclus and sébastien Faure, anarchist intellectuals generally kept a distance from it. In October 1886 Clément Duval, a member of the gang La Panthère des Batignolles, was arrested and brought to trial for robbery. In his trial, Duval refused to assume the position of thief and argued in favor of the right to the restitution of property.
Revolution, Dialectics of
Authors: Hudis Peter
Published: September 2017

since the mid‐nineteenth century, numerous political theorists and activists have considered dialectical philosophy to be “the algebra of revolution.” The efforts on the part of social struggles to overcome external and internal barriers to liberation have led many thinkers and activists to view dialectics as the expression of the immanent rhythm and self‐movement of revolution itself.
Revolutionary Action Movement
Authors: Amador Ernest A.
Published: September 2017

Disgruntled by the ineffectiveness of the peaceful strategy of the early civil rights movement, black college students formed the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) in 1963 in Philadelphia. RAM, the first black organization in the United states to call for a Marxist revolution, initiated a seven‐year militant campaign against what it identified as the African American's uncompromising, “incurable” enemy: a white‐dominated capitalist society. By 1967, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO program and state law agencies incarcerated RAM's leadership, oftentimes unlawfully, which encouraged disunity. RAM dissolved in 1968.
Robeson, Paul (1898–1976)
Authors: Zeitler Michael
Published: September 2017

As much as anyone in the decades following World War I, Paul Robeson helped to redefine black male identity in America and throughout the world. Born in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 9, 1898, the son of an ex‐slave minister father and school teacher mother, Robeson's career achievements seem the raw material of legend. As an actor, he starred on Broadway in Eugene O'Neill's
All God's Chillun Got Wings
and
The Emperor Jones
, shakespeare's
Othello
, and Jerome Kern's
showboat
. On screen, he pioneered the way for black actors in films like
song of Freedom
(1937) and
The Proud Valley
(1940), and fought against the dehumanizing black stereotypes commonly portrayed in American films. As an athlete, he won 15 sport letters and All American recognition at Rutgers University and excelled in the early days of professional football. As a singer and recording artist, he was equally at home performing classical arias, African American spirituals, and folk songs, and his renditions of “Old Man River” and “The Ballad for Americans” remain icons of American popular culture. As a linguist and scholar, Robeson spoke multiple languages, earned Phi Beta Kappa status and Rutgers valedictorian honors, and graduated from the Columbia University school of Law.
Rodney, Walter (1942–1980)
Authors: Bush Roderick
Published: September 2017

Walter Rodney grew up in Guyana in the wake of the labor uprisings of the late 1930s when national independence via constitutional decolon ization was on the agenda and political parties and trade unions were organizing the Indo‐Caribbean and Afro‐Caribbean masses. As a child of working‐class activists in the leftist People's Progressive Party in Guyana, the young Rodney's involvement in distributing party literature gave him a sense of the dawn of a new historical force. Rodney then was part of a new generation which, by the 1960s, would come to question the attitudes of the post‐independence governments toward the plight of the Afro‐Caribbean and Indo‐Caribbean working classes. Caribbean political novelist George Lamming lamented the manner in which the world division of labor, complicated by colonialism, has created an educated group that is contemptuous of the ordinary people of the Caribbean's adherence to non‐western cultural forms, despite their otherwise anti‐colonial stance (Bogues 2003: 127–8). While studying at the University of London, Rodney had been a member of a Marxist study group led by C. L. R. and selma James. From the Jameses, Rodney took the urgent necessity to pay attention to the concrete historical context and its nuances, and the need to grapple with human creativity in the political domain (Bogues 2003: 129).
Romania, Protest and Revolution, 20th century
Authors: Bogdan Jolan
Published: September 2017

Modern‐day Romania was established in 1858 by the joining of Moldavia and Wallachia and recognized as an independent state in 1878 by the Treaty of Berlin. Romania began as a monarchy, under the reign of German Prince Carol of Hohenzollern‐Sigmaringen, who became King Carol I in 1881 following the short reign of Alexandru Cusa, a reformist who quickly lost support among the wealthy after introducing land reform.
Romero, Óscar (1917–1980), Archbishop
Authors: Brett Edward T.
Published: September 2017

Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, born on August 15, 1917 in the remote town of Ciudad Barrios in the Department of San Miguel, El Salvador, in the 1970s became a leading figure in the Catholic clerical movement for an end to dictatorship in El Salvador and an advocate for the ideals of liberation theology, founded on principles of eliminating poverty through equalization of wealth. At the age of 13 he entered the minor seminary in San Miguel, and in 1937 graduated to the National Seminary in San Salvador. He evidently showed promise, because after only a few months the local bishop sent him to Rome to study at the Gregorian University, where he earned his licentiate degree in theology
cum laude
in 1941 and was ordained a priest on April 4, 1942. He remained in Rome to work toward a doctorate in ascetical theology, but in August 1943 was required to return to his native country before completing his degree due to complications resulting from World War II.
Roshaniya Movement and the Khan Rebellion
Authors: Bosin Yury V.
Published: September 2017

The Roshaniya, or “enlightened,” was a populist nonsectarian movement that arose among Afghan tribes in the mid‐sixteenth century. Roshaniya was founded by Bayazid Ansari, who challenged inequality and social injustice practiced by the ruling powers. The Roshaniya promulgated egalitarian codes and tenets within Islam.
R
oumain,
J
acques (1907–1944)
Authors: Smith Matthew J.
Published: September 2017

Jacques Roumain was born in Port‐au‐Prince, Haiti, on June 4, 1907. One of the Caribbean's foremost novelists, radical thinkers, and poets, Roumain achieved a great deal in a remarkably short life. His best‐known and final work, the evocative
Les Gouverneurs de la rosée (Masters of the Dew)
, remains a landmark in Caribbean literature.
R
ussell,
B
ertrand (1872–1970)
Authors: Heathorn Stephen
Published: September 2017

Bertrand Russell, distinguished British philosopher and public intellectual, devoted the greater part of his life to peace activism. Born into an aristocratic family, until 1914 Russell largely concerned himself with his academic career at Cambridge. However, his opposition to British entry into World War I, and then against the policy of conscription, cost him his academic career and pushed him into a life of protest. During the war he was twice prosecuted for sedition; the second offense earned him a six‐month prison term.
R
ussia, Cholera Riots of 1830–1831
Authors: Bosin Yury V.
Published: September 2017

The Russian cholera epidemic of 1829–31 was the cause of widespread popular unrest that developed in response to government checkpoints to prevent its spread and the perception that poor peasants and workers disproportionately suffered from the disease. Cholera reached Russia for the first time in September 1823 but soon ebbed due to the winter frosts. Six years later, in 1829, cholera reappeared in the southern cities of Astrakhan and Orenburg. According to official historic accounts, the disease was brought to Russia by Kyrghyz nomads. But in the fall of 1830 cholera spread even more extensively into the Russian heartland, reaching the edges of St. Petersburg, then Russia's capital. In response the government set up numerous quarantines, but it could not contain the epidemic. Subsequently the government set up checkpoints stopping merchant caravans, which in itself caused popular antagonism and disarray as the severity of the disease intensified among all social classes. Those who fell victim to the disease included upper classes, dukes, duchesses, generals, and the tsar's brother, Prince Konstantin. The death toll among the lower classes reached epidemic proportions, taking the lives of some 100,000 people.
Russian Civil War, 1918–1924
Authors: Mandel David
Published: September 2017

Historians often attribute the formation of a one‐party regime after the October Revolution to the Bolsheviks' thirst for power. But an examination of the actual developments shows that this is another case of reading history backwards. The Soviet state did eventually come to be ruled by a one‐party regime. But does that prove that the Bolsheviks began with that intention?
Russian Revolutionary Labor Upsurge, 1912–1914
Authors: Mandel David
Published: September 2017

Worker militancy after the defeat of Russia's 1905–7 revolutionary upsurge, as measured in strike activity, reached a low point in 1910, with a mere 222 strikes involving 46,000 workers. However, an economic recovery began in 1911 that soon turned into an industrial boom, increasing the industrial workforce from 1.8 million in 1910 to 2.5 million on the eve of the world war. The relative scarcity of labor reduced the workers' fear of losing their jobs and helped rekindle their fighting spirit. In 1911, the number of strikes and strikers more than doubled as compared to 1910.
Sacco and Vanzetti case
Authors: Collins Tom
Published: September 2017

Nicola Sacco (1891–1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888–1927) were Italian immigrant laborers and anarchists whose conviction in a murder case in the United States in 1921 aroused international controversy. The pair were accused of the armed robbery and murder of a company paymaster and his security guard outside a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920. Although their trial featured muddled eyewitness testimony and inconclusive ballistics evidence, the men were found unanimously guilty by a jury and sentenced to death by Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Webster Thayer. The verdict galvanized leftists, who denounced the trial as a miscarriage of justice tinged by anti‐immigrant and anti‐radical prejudice. Organizations such as the grassroots Sacco‐Vanzetti Defense Committee and the Communist Party‐backed International Labor Defense undertook mass publicity campaigns arguing for a new trial. The Sacco and Vanzetti case became a
cause cèlébre
among intellectuals and artists, including Albert Einstein, Anatole France, and Upton Sinclair. Harvard law professor (and future US Supreme Court justice) Felix Frankfurter led an effort by university faculty members, law students, and noted attorneys to overturn the verdict. Sacco and Vanzetti were household names in Latin America, where workers held solidarity rallies; American embassies and consulates in Europe received anarchist threats, and sometimes mail bombs; films were made about the anarchists' lives in Switzerland, Germany, and the Soviet Union. When Sacco and Vanzetti were executed in 1927 following a lengthy appeals process, the news met with global protests.
Sachs, Solly (1900–1976)
Authors: van der Walt Lucien
Published: September 2017

Born Emil Solomon Sachs in Kamaai, Lithuania, Solly Sachs immigrated with his family to Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1914. Along with his brother Bernard, he joined the revolutionary syndicalist International Socialist League in 1919, and was a leading figure in the Reef Shop Assistants' Union, a union that lasted until 1926. In the meantime, he joined the Young Communist League of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, and visited the Soviet Union in 1925. In 1926, he was elected to the executive committee of the South African Trade Union Congress, formed the previous year, followed by a position in 1927 as secretary of the Witwatersrand Middlemen Tailors' Association, and a position as secretary of the Garment Workers' Union in 1928.
Saint‐Just,LouisAntoine (1767–1794)
Authors: Linton Marisa A.
Published: September 2017

Louis Antoine Saint‐Just was a leading revolutionary during the French Revolution's most radical phase, the period of the Jacobin Republic and the Reign of Terror. Saint‐Just is remembered, depending on the ideology of who is doing the remembering, as either a model of heroic selfsacrifice, idealism, and revolutionary integrity, or a fanatical, blood‐thirsty, merciless destroyer of innocent victims. When it comes to interpretations of Saint‐Just, there is not much middle ground. Liberal and conservative historians unite in execrating his memory, while radical historians look upon him more favorably. As such, what an author writes about Saint‐Just often provides a reliable touchstone of that author's general interpretation of the French Revolution.
S
alvemini,
G
aetano (1873–1957)
Authors: Cherubini Donatella
Published: September 2017

Gaetano Salvemini was an intellectual and historian from southern Italy who was committed to the moral and economic rebirth of the south and critical of pre‐fascist liberal governments. Born in 1873, Salvemini had great influence on democrats and liberal socialists, and was an early opponent of fascism. He later taught in the US at Harvard University.
Samkange,SketchleySiyangapi (1936–1961)
Authors: Fourshey Catherine Cymone
Published: September 2017

Born in 1936 into a deeply Christian and politically active family in Southern Rhodesia, Sketchley Samkange became an important figure in Zimbabwean nationalist politics as a founder of the National Democratic Party (NDP), before he died at the age of 25 due to heart failure while swimming in Malawi. The youngest son of Thompson and Grace Samkange and brother of Stanlake Samkange, he grew up in a politically conscious, Methodist family that had focused primarily on the goal of a multicultural Zimbabwe. He was affectionately known to friends as Pip and to his family as Jack (of all trades).
S
ánchez
S
aornil,
L
ucía (1895–1970)
Authors: Graham Helen
Published: September 2017

Lucía Sánchez Saornil, anarcho‐feminist poet, journalist, and activist, was one of the most remarkable figures to emerge in the cultural and political ferment of Republican and revolutionary Spain in the 1930s. A subtle and complex thinker on gender, she also played a prominent role in the defense of the Second Spanish Republic during the civil war of 1936–9, and yet her name is relatively unknown.
S
anger,
M
argaret (1879–1966) and the
A
merican Birth Control Movement
Authors: Takeuchi Aiko
Published: September 2017

Margaret Sanger was an advocate and organizer of the American birth control movement and founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. While she remains a controversial figure, primarily because of her conflict with the Catholic Church's view of sexual morality and her close affiliation with “negative” eugenics, her birth control movement helped protect women's reproductive rights worldwide.
Saya San (Hsaya San) Movement of the 1930s
Authors: Dasgupta Nupur
Published: September 2017

The Saya San (Hsaya San) movement (1930–2) against British colonial rule in Burma combined rural millenarian insurgency with contemporary goals. Organized by the grassroots leader Saya San, a monk (often denigrated as a quack in British official records), this movement marks the extreme peak of the district‐based
Wunthanu
(protector of national interest) or Home Rule movement initiated in the 1920s. This struggle spread beyond the original urban localities, becoming practically a national uprising from below against the British economy, administration, and the very existence of the colonial regime in Burma.
Schindler, Oskar (1908–1974)
Authors: Redding Kimberly A.
Published: September 2017

Oskar Schindler was born, educated, and married in Sudetenland, the German‐speaking part of the Austro‐Hungarian empire, a region ceded to Czechoslovakia after World War I. Amidst growing German nationalist sentiment in the 1920s and 1930s, Schindler joined the Patriotic Front of Sudeten Germans and was recruited by the German counterintelligence service in 1935. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, Schindler took over an all‐but‐bankrupt enamelware factory in Krakow. Winning a military contract and employing an ever‐growing number of Jewish slave laborers, Schindler revived the business to profitability. Soon thereafter, Schindler began falsifying factory records and bribing Nazi
Schutzstaffel
(SS) officers to protect the laborers and their families.
Sendic, Raúl (1926–1989)
Authors: Thimmel Stefan
Published: September 2017

Raúl Sendic was a Uruguayan union founder, an underground militant activist, and co‐founder of the guerrilla movement Tupamaros. From the late 1950s on he organized the pauperized sugar cane workers in the northeast of Uruguay. In the 1960s he became a symbolic figure of the militant fight against the repressive Uruguayan state.
Serge, Victor (1890–1947)
Authors: Shantz Jeff
Published: September 2017

Victor Serge is considered a leading Russian intellectual and critic of both the former Soviet Union and capitalist states of the West. His numerous works on socialism and revolution include
What Everyone Should Know about State Repression
(1926) and
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
(1951), books that remain widely read. Born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich in Brussels to a family exiled from Russia for participation in the Narodnik peasant movement and People's Will direct action group, his youthful experiences of extreme poverty shaped a lifelong commitment to social and economic justice and the belief in the necessity of revolutionary social transformation.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751–1816)
Authors: Gorrie Richard
Published: September 2017

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a noted dramatist and politician, was regarded by friends and foes as the preeminent parliamentary orator of the period, championing causes such as political reform, the French and American Revolutions, and Irish independence.
S
ilva,
L
yndolpho (b. 1924)
Authors: Macedo Rogério Fernandes
Published: September 2017

Lyndolpho Silva was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on November 25, 1924. In 1942 he became involved with the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), but did not join the party until 1947. In 1954, he founded and directed the Brazilian Rural Workers' and Peasants' Union (União dos Lavradores e Trabalhadores Agrícolas do Brasil, ULTAB‐Brazil). In 1963, ULTAB was renamed the Agriculture Workers' National Confederation (Confereraçao Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricoltura, CONTAG) by the PCB, and Lyndolpho became its first president. He was responsible for the approval, in 1963, of the Rural Worker Statute, which regulated rural labor relations. On March 15, 1964, Lyndolpho called a public meeting at the Central do Brasil train station in Rio de Janeiro at which the Brazilian president, João Goulart, delivered a speech. At that gathering Lyndolpho called for the implementation of basic reforms, democratic freedom for unions, and the extension of voting rights to illiterate people and soldiers. After the military seized power in 1964, Lyndolpho was deposed from the CONTAG presidency and in 1967 his political rights were abrogated by the Second Institutional Act (AI2). He went into exile in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1973, where he joined the Rural Workers' International Union. In August 1979 he returned to Brazil to work with the PCB, which had been declared illegal during the military dictatorship. He withdrew from political activities in 1998.
S
imons,
R
ay
A
lexander (1913–2004)
Authors: Ulrich Nicole , van der Walt Lucien
Published: September 2017

Ray Alexander Simons was born Rachel Esther Alexandrowitch in Latvia in 1913. She was drawn to communism at an early age and became involved in Latvia's underground communist movement in her teens. Alexander left for South Africa in 1929. The exact reasons for the family's emigration are not very clear, but the oppressive atmosphere of anti‐Semitism and political repression doubtless played a role. The decision was a fortunate one, for Latvia became a fascist state in 1934, and the Nazi occupation of 1941–4 led to large‐scale massacres of Jews, including Alexander's two half‐sisters and their families.
Slave rescues and the Underground Railroad,
U
nited
S
tates
Authors: Blackett Richard J. M.
Published: September 2017

On an early spring afternoon almost one year to the day before the outbreak of the Civil War, a large pine box was thrown onto the platform from a train at Seymour, Indiana. The impact caused the box to break and out fell a black man who was immediately arrested. As it turned out, he was a slave from Nashville, Tennessee. Even before the train had reached Seymour, the slave's owner had wired authorities in Louisville, Kentucky to be on the lookout for Aleck who, as he later told an inquiry, was assisted in his efforts to escape by Nathan James, a free black, Alf Savage, a slave who had lived relatively freely in the city for many years, and an unnamed “white man.” Aleck, who attended the same church as James, had paid the white man $60 and a silver watch to cover the cost of his escape. James had procured the box and he and Savage made sure that the box, addressed to Levi Coffin in Cincinnati, got to the local office of the Adams Express Company.
Socialism
Authors: Smith David Michael
Published: September 2017

The origins of socialism are deeply rooted in the European working‐class movements of the nineteenth century and their growing opposition to capitalism and private property. By 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had emerged as instrumental voices identifying the main political tasks facing the proletariat. Their first major imperative was the organization of the working class into a political party that could fight for its emancipation from the exploitation and oppression inherent in capitalism. In the Communist Manifesto and other writings, Marx and Engels argued that such a party was absolutely essential for educating and organizing the working class in support of the abolition of capitalism. Marx and Engels did more than write about the need for such a party. They also played a prominent role in the Communist League in the heady revolutionary period of 1847–9, struggled to win support for their political views in the First International Workingmen's Association in the more quiescent period of 1864–72, and strongly criticized both reformism and anarchism.
Socialisme ou
B
arbarie
Authors: Boukalas Christos
Published: September 2017

Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbarity) (henceforth S/B) was a libertarian‐socialist group active in France between 1949 and 1966. Named after a phrase by German communist Rosa Luxenburg, S/B was founded by Cornelius Castoriadis (aka Paul Cardan) and Claude Lefort. The group made a deep mark in French radical thought and practice via its publications (the reviews
Socialisme Ou Barbarie, Tribune Ouviere
, and
Povoir Ouviere)
and the participation of leading left intellectuals, including Guy Debord, Gérard Genette, Pierre Guillaume, and Jean‐François Lyotard. It influenced the Situationists through Guy Debord, and Daniel Cohn‐Bendit proclaimed that in his interventions during May 1968 he was largely “plagiarizing” S/B views.
S
oe,
T
hakin (1906–1989)
Authors: Waskey Andrew J.
Published: September 2017

U Thakin Soe was a Burmese Communist Party leader who helped to found the Burmese Communist Party in 1937. A pro‐Russian communist, he strictly followed the Moscow policy of absolutely no cooperation with the Japanese, organizing in 1943 a guerilla resistance movement and establishing his headquarters in the Irawadi Delta in the Pyapon District.
S
olomon
I
slands, Protest and Uprisings
Authors: Corfield Justin
Published: September 2017

The southern and eastern parts of the Solomon Islands were settled by hunter‐gatherers from New Guinea as early as 25,000
bce
, with the Lapita people arriving between 2000 and 1600
bce
. The Polynesians started settling from 1200–1600
ce
, with Tongans arriving between 1300 and 1700
ce
. The first European contact was on February 7, 1568, when the Spanish seafarer Don Alvaro de Mendana y Neyra arrived from Peru and remained in the islands until August 11. He returned in 1595 with 450 Spaniards who established a settlement which was abandoned some years later. The next European contact was in 1767, when Captain Philip Carteret, a British sea captain, visited Santa Cruz and Malaita. From 1798 British, American, and French traders and whalers started visiting regularly, keen on purchasing sandalwood.
S
ouchy,
A
ugustin (1892–1984)
Authors: Cohn Jesse
Published: September 2017

An indefatigable propagandist for the anarchist cause with an uncanny gift for languages, Augustin Souchy, in the words of his friend Abe Bluestein, “had a knack to be at the centre of historic developments.” As a young man, Souchy joined Gustav Landauer's Sozialistischer Bund (Socialist Federation) after hearing him speak in Berlin in 1911 and helped to campaign against the European powers' growing drive to war. This first serious political commitment–which would see him flee to Sweden in 1914 to escape conscript tion–deeply marked his beliefs thereafter. Like Landauer (whose biography he wrote in prison), he never ceased to conceive of anarchism in terms of non‐violence, and he brought a distinctly anti‐militarist sensibility to the German anarchosyndicalist movement.
SouthAfrica, Water Struggles
Authors: Partzsch Lena , Winkler Inga T.
Published: September 2017

Since the late 1990s there has been a worldwide upsurge of social movements and struggles against neoliberal globalization and the power of large multinational corporations. A major area of struggle has been the commercialization of common goods and services, such as drinking water and electricity.
S
outh
A
frican Communist Party, 1953–Present
Authors: Drew Allison
Published: September 2017

Formed as an underground party in 1953, the South African Communist Party (SACP) is the successor of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) launched in 1921, and banned in 1950 with the Suppression of Communism Act. While the CPSA had generally stressed working‐class organization and class struggle, the SACP emphasized close collaboration with the African nationalist movement.
S
outhern
A
frica, Popular Resistance to Neoliberalism, 1982–2007
Authors: Bond Patrick
Published: September 2017

Southern Africa–defined here as Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe–is arguably the world's most unequal region. Characterized by a bitter colonial history, uneven development, and a series of wars shaped by the Cold War context, and generally dominated by South Africa, the region was affected by neoliberal policies from the 1980s. These pitted the ruling elites, often with national liberation backgrounds, against the mass of citizenry, who have resisted in various ways, ranging from fighting for access to health care and water, to pro‐democracy struggles, to strikes, to revived center‐left and left social movements.
Spence, Thomas (1750–1814)
Authors: Arnold Victoria
Published: September 2017

Thomas Spence was among the best‐known partisans of the French Revolution‐inspired English Jacobin movement of the 1790s, and was certainly one of the most radical. He was an indefatigable theorist and propagandist whose programmatic ideas centered on advocacy of land nationalization.
Spinoza, Baruch (1632–1677)
Authors: Waskey Andrew J.
Published: September 2017

Baruch (Benedict de) Spinoza was born November 24, 1632 in Amsterdam. His parents were Portuguese emigrants and members of the Jewish community of Amsterdam where his father was prospering as a merchant. His mother died when he was six, which was also about the time he began to attend the Jewish school founded in Amsterdam in 1638 and where he learned Hebrew. After school he took private lessons in Latin, German, and other languages.
Spithead and Nore Mutinies,Britain, 1797
Authors: Spoden Elizabeth
Published: September 2017

In 1797, four years into its war with revolutionary France, the British Navy experienced the largest mass disobedience in its history when over 20,000 sailors in two separate mutinies protested working conditions by refusing to weigh anchor. Although contemporaries blamed outside revolutionary influences, the mutineers were acting in a manner consistent with generations of sailors who frequently resorted to mutiny and lesser forms of subversion when their basic rights were denied.
Stalin, Joseph (1879–1953) and “Revolution from Above”
Authors: Le Blanc Paul
Published: September 2017

Communism has been profoundly impacted by the policies and perspectives of Joseph Stalin–particularly what some scholars have identified as the sweeping “revolution from above” that he initiated in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the 1930s Stalin had become the undisputed leader of the USSR and of the mainstream world communist movement. He identified his authoritarian and often brutal policies, and the ideology justifying those policies, with the legacy of Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin–in fact, he and his followers labeled their ideology “Marxism‐Leninism.” Stalin established what some scholars have labeled a totalitarian regime–one in which a single monolithic party, utilizing the new technologies of the twentieth century, sought to control all aspects of political, economic, social, and cultural life through the use of terror, repression, and enforced ideological conformity. In the minds of many people communism consequently has become synonymous with this conception of totalitarianism.
Student Movements, Chicano/a, 1960s–2000s
Authors: Gradilla Alexandro José
Published: September 2017

Chicana and Chicano student social movements from the 1960s through the early twenty‐first century share many common themes, techniques, and strategies. Key goals have been gaining recognition or acknowledgment, and redefining or self‐naming their identity. Chicana and Chicano youth for over forty years have been fighting for social justice in the daily spheres of their lives: schools and communities. These student movements have attempted to bridge both institutional spaces. A significant backdrop is the persistent negative conditions in education–high drop‐out (push‐out) rates and lack of access to higher education.
Student Movements, Czechoslovakia, 1960s
Authors: Pazout Jaroslav
Published: September 2017

University students were the most vocal and persistent critics of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia throughout the state socialist period. In Prague students were the only group to mobilize in resistance to the Communist Party in 1948 as it sought to consolidate control over the state. Their protests resulted in both severe curtailment of civil liberties within universities and youth organizations, and far‐reaching sanctions against student activists. The new regime demanded complete ideological conformity, even in the university environment. After a brief relaxation of the more repressive measures, in 1956 a new cohort of students met the wrath of the state as they demanded greater autonomy and freedom of expression. The students of the 1960s understood their own protests within a tradition of resistance defined by previous generations.
Student Movements, Czechoslovakia, 1980s
Authors: Vaněk Miroslav
Published: September 2017

Dissatisfaction with the communist regime in socialist Czechoslovakia was on the rise throughout the 1980s. Toward the end of the decade, at a time when the international situation was beginning to improve (due to perestroika and glasnost), opposition from members of the educated public, especially artists, scientists, and scholars, journalists and university students, grew more pronounced. By the end of 1988 the students had once again emerged to play a major role in the political process, as they had done in every generation since the communist takeover. These students were too young to have experienced the Prague Spring and the student movement of the 1960s, and thus did not suffer from “1968 syndrome.” They were more open to the political ideas and cultural trends in Western Europe than the previous generation. As students came together to share both their interests and dissatisfaction with the communist regime, they developed “islands of freedom” where they discussed such topics as their country's environmental problems and the independent peace movement, as well as rock, punk, and new wave music. These young people were not only critical of the regime itself, but skeptical of the ideological and moral principles on which it was based. Their efforts to achieve freedom of expression and discretion over their own free time were fledgling steps toward establishing a civil society.
SWAPO (South West African People's Organization)
Authors: Dedering Tilman
Published: September 2017

The South West African People's Organization (SWAPO) was formed in the 1950s in contemporary Namibia among a group of about 200 Ovambo workers who had maneuvered their way through the bureaucratic maze of the migrant labor system to reach Cape Town where they faced the constant danger of falling foul of the repressive South African pass laws. Under the leadership of Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, this group established connections with white and black members of left and liberal South African opposition groups, such as the African National Congress, the Communist Party, the Liberal Party, the Congress of Democrats, and the South African Coloured People's Organization. In 1957 the South African government removed Toivo to Ovamboland, where he continued campaigning for political independence and petitioning the United Nations. The Ovambo People's Organization (OPO) emerged from this set of connections between Namibian and South African activists and against the background of the increasing internationalization of anti‐colonial resistance in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1960 it was transformed into SWAPO. Unlike other emerging leaders of the independence movement, such as Sam Nujoma, Toivo did not go into exile. In 1966 the apartheid government sentenced Toivo to 20 years in prison. He was released in 1984 and joined SWAPO in exile, which in the meantime had been recognized as the sole representative of the Namibian people under the organization's energetic president, Nujoma.
Sylvis, William H. (1828–1869) and the National Labor Union
Authors: Smulewicz‐Zucker Gregory R.
Published: September 2017

William H. Sylvis was one of the earliest and most radical American labor leaders. He first served as president of the Iron Molders' International Union and was later elected president of the shortlived National Labor Union. While his memory and significance are largely overshadowed by the eventual decline of the National Labor Union and by the better‐known and more successful labor leaders that followed him, during his short life Sylvis led ambitious campaigns for working people's rights, attempted prescient reforms of the labor movement, and exerted significant political influence. He was a pioneer in the effort to forge national cooperation among American working people, regardless of race or gender. Had he lived longer, he intended to strengthen the United States' ties to the international labor movement.
Syndicalism, Greece
Authors: Koukoules Georgos
Published: September 2017

The Greek labor movement reflects the particularities of socioeconomic development in the Greek state from the 1870s to the early twentieth century. The early development of labor syndicalism emerged during the depression in Western Europe after 1873 which forced capital to seek new national markets in Greece. The Greek economy also expanded in the late nineteenth century as expatriate capital began flowing into the country. The conditions for elementary industrial development were also facilitated from 1875 to 1895 by measures introduced by the government of Prime Minister Charilaos Trikoupis to insulate domestic production from foreign imports. Greek industrial activity also expanded through the construction of a national transportation network in 1884 and the development of government infrastructure. Despite modest industrialization in the early twentieth century, 50.5 percent of Greece's population remained active in the dominant agrarian economy.