Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

Goldman was born 1869 in Kowno (at the time Russian) and emigrated to the United States in 1885. There she saw the executions of striking workers subsequent to the Haymarket-Affair in Chicago, after this experience she got involved with the anarchist movement.

As two of the founders of the Institute for Workers’ Control (IWC), with Michael Barratt Brown, Ken Coates and Tony Topham were key influences on the development of the labour movement and politics during the period of raised worker militancy in the UK in the 1960s through to its decline in the 1980s.  Part of a generation of socialists who distanced themselves from the Communist Party both were signatories of The May Day Manifesto, a defining document of the ‘new left’ in Britain.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919)

Rosa Luxemburg championed the idea of the mass strike. In 1914 she became a tireless opponent of WWI. Because of their approval of the war she renounced the German Social Democracy, helped to create the Spartacus League, and later the German Communist Party. Luxemburg was critical of the Soviet government. In 1919 she got executed by the German government in the aftermath of a failed uprising.

Rosa Luxemburg archive in English in the Marxist’s Internet Archives:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/index.htm

Paul Mattick (1904-1981)

Paul Mattick archive in Englisch in the Marxist’s Internet Archives
http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/index.htm

Richard Müller (1880-1943)

Richard Müller was one of the leading figures of the German Revolution 1918. Starting as a local union organizer he began to organize political strikes against WWI in 1916 with a group called "Revolutionary Stewards". This group had started as opposition within the German Metalworkers Union (DMV) and later became very influential for the movement of worker´s councils in 1918/1919.