On May 16, 1920, workers took over thirteen creameries in Limerick, Ireland, beginning an occupation that would reverberate across the country. They hoisted a red flag over the central plant at Knocklong and unfurled a banner: “We make butter, not profits. Knocklong Creamery Soviet.”

Though the workers relented on May 22, after demands on wages and working conditions were met, the Knocklong Soviet raised the specter of workers’ control and generated widespread interest in labor circles. The creamery seizure is also noteworthy because it came at a time when, according to popular memory, class struggle had given way to the independence struggle. Throwing off the chains of the British — rather than those of the employer class — was supposed to have animated Irish workers during those years.

Even within the labor movement, militant trade unionism is presumed to have arrived with “Big Jim” Larkin in 1907 and to have been crushed during the 1913 Lockout. Any remnants of revolutionary socialism, the story goes, were buried with James Connolly’s body after the Easter Rising.