Jim Larkin Was One of the Great Leaders of the Radical Workers’ Movement
From Ireland to the US, Jim Larkin helped organize some of the key labor struggles and movements of his day. Larkin also tried to build an Irish communist party, but his independent spirit clashed with a heavy-handed bureaucratic line from Moscow and London.
Jim Larkin in a November 8, 1919 mug shot taken at the time of his arrest for “criminal anarchism” in New York state. (In Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics (Albany, NY: J.B. Lyon Co., 1920) via Wikimedia Commons)
The Irish syndicalist trade-union leader James Larkin was one of the towering figures of the radical workers’ movement in the early twentieth century. He achieved fame — in the words of Lenin — as “a remarkable speaker and a man of seething energy” who “performed miracles amongst the unskilled workers.”
Larkin led celebrated struggles in Belfast and Dublin during the run-up to World War I. He formed the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) as well as an armed workers’ militia, the Irish Citizen Army, and spent time in prison for his militancy.
However, after he helped found the Communist Party in the United States and was jailed once more for doing so, Larkin became the subject of fierce criticism from communists during the late 1920s for failing to build a revolutionary workers’ party in Ireland. “The first and most pressing duty of communists,” one British party member wrote in 1929, “is to expose Larkin and drive him out of the working-class movement.”
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